Port Mortuary

by Patricia Cornwell

  We begin backing up, pulling out of my parking lot, waiting for the gate to open, and I feel handled. I feel humored. I’m not sure I remember ever feeling so nonessential in an investigation, as if I’m an obstruction and a nuisance people have to be politically correct with because of my position, but not taken seriously and unwanted.

  “I thought I’d seen it all. I’m warning you it’s bad, Kay.” Benton’s voice has no energy as he says that. It sounds hollow, like something gutted.

  19

  The gray frame house with the old stone foundation and a cold cellar in back were built by a sea captain in centuries past. The property is scrubbed and eroded by harsh weather, directly exposed to what blows in from the sea, and sits alone at the end of a narrow, icy street coarsely sanded by city emergency crews. Where branches have snapped, ice is shattered on the frozen earth and sparkles like broken glass in a high sun that offers no warmth, only a blinding glare.

  Sand makes a gritty sound against the underside of the SUV while Benton drives very slowly, looking for a place to park, and I look out at the brightness of the sandy road and the heaving deep-blue of the sea and the paler blue of the cloudless sky. I no longer feel the need for sleep or that I could if I tried. Having last gotten up at quarter of five yesterday morning in Delaware, I have been awake some thirty hours since, which isn’t unheard of for me, isn’t really remarkable if I pause to calculate how often it happens in a profession where people don’t have the common courtesy to kill or to die during business hours. But this is a different type of sleeplessness, foreign and unfamiliar, with the added excitement bordering on hysteria from being told or having it implied at least that I’ve lived much of my life with something deadly and I’m the reason it turned deadly.

  No one is stating such a thing in exactly those words, but I know it to be true. Benton is diplomatic, but I know. He’s not said it’s my fault people are brutally dead and countless others have been disrespected and defiled, not to mention those harmed by drugs, people whose names we may never know, guinea pigs or “lab rats,” as Benton put it, for a malevolent science project involving a potent form of anabolic steroid or testosterone laced with a hallucinogenic to build strength and muscle mass and enhance aggression and fearlessness. To create killing machines, to turn human beings into monstrosities with no frontal cortex, no concept of consequences, human robots that savagely kill and feel no remorse, feel virtually nothing at all, including pain. Benton has been describing what Liam Saltz told the FBI this morning, the poor man bereft and terrified.

  Dr. Saltz suspects Eli got involved with a treacherous and unauthorized technology at Otwahl, found himself in the midst of DARPA research gone bad, gone frighteningly wrong, and was about to warn his humanitarian Nobel laureate stepfather and to offer proof and to beg him to put a stop to it. Fielding put a stop to Eli because Fielding was using these dangerous drugs, perhaps helping to distribute them, but mostly my deputy chief with his lifelong lust for strength and physical beauty and his chronic aches and pains was addicted. That’s the theory behind Fielding’s vile crimes, and I don’t believe it is that simple or even true. But I do believe other comments Benton has continued to make. I was too good to Fielding. I’ve always been too good to him. I’ve never seen him for what he is or accepted his potential to do real harm, and therefore I enabled him.

  Snow turned to freezing rain where the ocean warms the air, and the power is still out from downed lines in this area of Salem Neck called Winter Island, where Jack Fielding owns a historic investment property I had no idea about. To get to it you have to pass the Plummer Home for Boys, a lovely mossy green mansion set on a gracious spread of lawn overlooking the sea, with a distant view of the wealthy resort community of Marblehead. I can’t help but think about the way things begin and end, the way people have a tendency to run in place, to tread water, to really not get beyond where and how it all started for them.

  Fielding stopped his life where it took off for him so precipitously, in a picturesque setting for troubled youths who can no longer live with their families. I wonder if it was deliberate to pick a spot no more than a stone’s throw from a boys’ home, if that factored into his subconscious when he decided on a property I’m told he intended to retire to or perhaps sell for a profit in the future when the real-estate market turns around and after he’d finished much-needed improvements. He’d been doing the work on the house and its outbuilding himself and doing it poorly, and I’m about to see the manifestation of his disorganized, chaotic mind, the handiwork of someone profoundly out of control, Benton has let me know. I’m about to see the way my enabled protégé lived and ended.

  “Are you still with us? I know you’re tired,” Benton says as he touches my arm.

  “I’m fine.” I realize he’s been talking and I tuned him out.

  “You don’t look fine. You’re still crying.”

  “I’m not crying. It’s the sun. I can’t believe I left my sunglasses somewhere.”

  “I’ve said you can have mine.” His dark glasses turn toward me as he creeps along the sandy, gritty-sounding road in the glaring sun.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on with you, because we’re not going to have a chance to talk for a while,” he says. “You’re angry with me.”

  “You’re just doing your job, whatever it is.”

  “You’re angry with me because you’re angry at Jack, and you’re afraid to be angry at him.”

  “I’m not afraid of what I feel about him. I’m more afraid of everyone else,” I reply.

  “Meaning what, exactly?”

  “It’s something I sense, and you don’t agree with me, so we should leave it at that,” I say to him as I look out the window at the cold, blue ocean and the distant horizon, where I can make out houses on the shore.

  “Maybe you could be a little more specific. What do you sense? Is this a new thought?”

  “It isn’t. And it’s nothing anybody wants to hear,” I answer him as I stare out at the bright afternoon while we continue to troll for a place to park.

  I’m not really helping him look for a spot. Mostly I’m sitting and staring out the window while my mind goes where it wants to, like a small animal darting about, looking for a safe place. Benton probably thinks I’m pretty useless. He’s aided and abetted my uselessness by waiting this long to come get me for something that’s been going on for hours. I’m showing up in medias res, as if this is a musical or an opera and it’s no big deal for me to wander in during the middle or toward the end, depending on which act we’re in.

  “Christ, this is ridiculous. You would think someone would have left us something. I should have had Marino put cones out, save us something.” Benton vents his anger at parked cars and the narrow street, then says to me, “I want to hear whatever it is. New thought or not. Now, while we have a minute alone.”

  There is no point in saying the rest of it, of telling him again what I sense, which is a calculating, cruel logic behind what was done to Wally Jamison, Mark Bishop, and Eli Goldman, behind what happened to Fielding, behind everything, a precisely formulated agenda, even if it didn’t turn out as planned. Not that I know the plan in its entirety, maybe not even most of it, but what I sense is palpable and undeniable, and I won’t be talked out of it. Trust your instincts. Don’t trust anything else. This is about power. The power to control people, to make them feel good or frightened or to suffer unbearably. Power over life and death. I’m not going to repeat what I’m sure sounds irrational. I’m not going to tell Benton yet again that I sense an insatiable desire for power, that I feel the presence of a murderous entity watching us from a dark place, lying in wait. Some things are over, but not everything is, and I don’t say any of this to him.

  “I’m just going to have to tuck it in here, and the hell with it.” He isn’t really talking to me but to himself, easing as close to a rock wall as he can so we don’t stick halfway out into the slick, sandy street. “
We’ll hope some yahoo doesn’t hit me. If so, he’ll be in for an unpleasant surprise.”

  I suppose he means it wouldn’t be fun to realize the door you just dinged or the bumper you just scraped or the side you just swiped is the property of the FBI. The SUV is a typical government vehicle, black with tinted glass and cloth seats, and emergency strobes hidden behind the grille, and on the floor in back are two coffee cups neatly held in place inside their cardboard to-go box along with a balled-up food bag. The war wagon of a busy agent who is tidy but not always in a convenient spot to toss out trash. I didn’t know that Douglas was a woman until Benton referred to the special agent who’s assigned this car as “she” a little while ago while he was telling me about her running the license plate of the Bentley that met us at Hanscom last night, a 2003 four-door black Flying Spur personally owned by the CEO of a Boston-based niche service company that supplies “discreet concierge-minded chauffeurs” who will drive any vehicle requested, explaining why the Bentley didn’t have a livery license plate.

  The reservation was made online by someone using an e-mail address that belongs to Johnny Donahue, an inpatient at McLean with no Internet access when the e-mail was sent yesterday from an IP address that is an Internet café near Salem State College, which is very close to here. The credit card used belongs to Erica Donahue, and as far as anybody knows, she doesn’t do anything online and won’t touch a computer. Needless to say, the FBI and the police don’t believe she or her son booked the Bentley or the driver.

  The FBI and the police believe Fielding did, that he likely got access to Mrs. Donahue’s credit card information from payments she made to the tae kwon do club for lessons her son took until he was told not to come back after he tried to kick his instructor, my deputy chief, a grandmaster with a seventh-degree black belt. It isn’t clear how Fielding might have gained access to Johnny’s e-mail account unless he somehow manipulated the vulnerable and gullible teenager into giving him the password at some point or learned it by some other means.

  The chauffeur, who isn’t suspected of anything except not bothering to research Dr. Scarpetta before he delivered something to her, received the assignment from dispatch, and according to dispatch, no one who works at the elite transportation company ever met the alleged Mrs. Donahue or talked to her over the phone. In the notes section of the online reservation, an “exotic luxury car” was requested for an “errand” with the explanation that further instructions and a letter to be delivered would be dropped off at the private driving company’s headquarters. At approximately six p.m., a manila envelope was slipped through the mail slot in the front door, and some four hours later, the chauffeur showed up at Hanscom Field with it and decided that Benton was me.

  We get out into the cold, clean air, and ice is everywhere, lit up by the sun as if we are inside an illuminated crystal chandelier. Shielding my eyes with my hand, I watch the dark-blue sea as it rolls and contracts like muscle, pushing itself inland to smash and boil against a rock-strewn shore where no one lives. Right here a sea captain once looked out at a view that I doubt has changed much in hundreds of years, acres of rugged coastline and beach with copses of hardwood trees, untouched and uninhabitable because it is part of a marine recreational park, which happens to have a boat launch.

  A little farther down, past the campground, where the Neck wraps around toward the Salem Harbor, is a yacht yard where Fielding’s twenty-foot Mako was shrink-wrapped and on a jack stand when police found it this morning. I’m vaguely aware he has a dive boat because I’ve heard him mention it, but I didn’t know where he keeps it. I never would have imagined twenty-four hours ago that it might become the focus of a homicide investigation, or that his dark-blue Navigator SUV with its missing front license plate would, or that his Glock pistol with its drilled-off serial number would, or that everything Fielding owns and has done throughout his entire existence would.

  Overhead, an orange Dauphin helicopter, an HH-65A, also known as a Dolphin, beats low across the cold, blue sky, its enclosed Fenestron ten-bladed tail rotor making a distinctive modulated sound that is described as low noise but to me has a quiet high pitch, is ominously whiny, reminding me a bit of a C-17. Homeland Security is conducting air surveillance, and I’ve been told that, too. I don’t know why federal law enforcement has taken to the air or the land or the sea unless there is a concern about the overall security of the Salem Harbor, a significant port with a huge power plant. I have heard the word terrorism mentioned, just in passing by Benton and also by Marino when I had him on the phone a few minutes ago, but these days I hear that word a lot. In fact, I hear it all the time. Bioterrorism. Chemical terrorism. Domestic terrorism. Industrial terrorism. Nanoterrorism. Technoterrorism. Everything is terrorism if I stop to think about it. Just as every violent crime is hateful and a hate crime, really.

  I continue going back to Otwahl, everything leading me back to Otwahl, my thoughts carried on the wing of a flybot or, as Lucy puts it, not a flybot but the holy grail of flybots. Then I think about my old nemesis MORT, a life-size model of it perched like a giant mechanical insect inside a Cambridge apartment rented by Eli Goldman, and next I worry about the controversial scientist Dr. Liam Saltz, who must be heartbroken beyond remedy. Maybe he simply got caught in one of those ghastly coincidences that happens in life, his tragic misfortune to be the stepfather of a brilliant young man who slipped into bad science, bad drugs, and illegal firearms.

  A kid too smart for his own good, as Benton puts it, murdered while wearing an antique signet ring missing from Erica Donahue’s house, just as her stationery is missing, and her typewriter and a fountain pen, items that Fielding must have gotten hold of somehow. He must have gotten his hands on all sorts of things from the rich Harvard student he bullied, Johnny Donahue, and it doesn’t matter if it all feels wrong to me. I can’t prove that Fielding didn’t exchange the gold ring for drugs. I can’t prove he didn’t exchange the Glock for drugs. I can’t say that’s not why Eli had the ring and the gun, that there’s some other reason far more nefarious and dangerous than what Benton and others are proposing.

  I can say and have said that Eli Goldman was an obstruction to the mercenary progress of a company like Otwahl, and Otwahl is the common denominator in everything, more so than tae kwon do or Fielding. As far as I’m concerned, if Fielding is as directly and solely responsible as everyone is claiming, then we should be taking a very hard and different look at Otwahl and wonder what he had to do with the place beyond being a user or a research subject or even someone who helped distribute experimental drugs until they brought about his complete annihilation.

  “Otwahl and Jack Fielding,” I said to Benton a little while ago. If Fielding is guilty of murder and case-tampering and obstruction of justice and all sorts of lies and conspiracies, then he’s intimately connected with Otwahl, right down to its parking lot, where his Navigator likely got tucked out of sight last night during a blizzard. “You have to make that connection in a meaningful way,” I repeatedly told Benton on our drive to this desolate spot that is achingly beautiful and yet ruined, as if Fielding’s property is an ugly stain on the canvas of an exquisite seascape.

  “Otwahl Technologies and an eighteenth-century sea captain’s house on Salem Neck,” I said to my husband, and I asked his opinion, his honest and objective opinion. After all, he should have a very well-informed and completely objective opinion because of his alliance with the well-informed and completely objective we’s, as I stated it, these anonymous comrades of his, the shadowy rank and file of an FBI he doesn’t belong to anymore, he claims, and of course I don’t believe him. He is FBI, all right, as secretive and driven as I remember him from times long past, and maybe I could put up with that if I didn’t feel so utterly alone.

  He’s not even listening to me anymore, pretty much checked out when I made the comment a few minutes ago that Fielding must have some link to Otwahl beyond his teaching martial arts to a few brainy students who had internships with the technology
behemoth. The connection must be more than just drugs, I said. Drug-impregnated pain-relieving patches can’t be the entire explanation for what I’m about to find inside a tiny stone outbuilding that Fielding was turning into a guest quarters before he supposedly found another use for it that has earned it several new names.

  The Kill Cottage, I think darkly, bitterly. The Semen’s House, I think cynically.

  Destined to be Salem’s latest attraction during Halloween, which lasts all of October, with a million people making a pilgrimage here from all over the land. Another example of a place made famous by atrocities that don’t seem real anymore, tall tales, almost cartoonish, like the witch on her broom depicted on the Salem logo that is on police patches and even painted on the police cruiser doors. Be careful what you hate and murder, because one day it will own you. The Witch City, as people have dubbed the place where those men and women were herded up to what is now called Gallows Hill Park, a spot similar to where Fielding bought a sea captain’s house. Places that don’t change much. Places that are now parks. Only Gallows Hill is ugly, and it should be. An open field ravaged by the wind, and barren. Mostly rocks, weeds, and patchy, coarse grass. Nothing grows there.

  Thoughts like these are solar flares, and peak and spike with a timing I can’t seem to control, as Benton touches my elbow, then grips it firmly, while we cross the sandy dead-end street that has turned into a parking lot of law-enforcement vehicles, marked and unmarked, some with the Salem logo, silhouettes of witches straddling their brooms. Pulled up close to the sea captain’s house, almost right up against the back of it, is the CFC’s white van-body truck that Marino drove here hours earlier while I was in the autopsy room and then upstairs, having no idea what was happening some thirty miles northeast. The back of the truck is open, and Marino is inside, wearing green rubber boots and a bright-yellow hard hat and a bright-yellow level-A suit, what we use for demanding jobs that require protection from biological and chemical hazards.