Port Mortuary

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Things really aren’t that bad,” a deep voice says. “It hasn’t come to that, has it?” General John Briggs says.

  I look up at him standing over me, his legs spread, his hands behind his back, big and bulky in bright yellow, but he’s not wearing a face shield or gloves or a hard hat, his face ruggedly compelling, hawklike, it’s been described as, and shadowed with stubble. He’s a dark man, and no matter how often he shaves, he always looks as if he needs to, his eyes the same dark gray as the titanium veneer on my building, his black hair thick with very little gray for his age, which is exactly sixty.

  “Colonel,” he then says, and he squats next to me and picks up the flashlight I was using earlier and had left upright on the stone floor. “I imagine you’re wondering the same thing I am.” He turns on the light.

  “I seriously doubt it,” I reply as he shines the light inside Fielding’s left ear.

  “I’m wondering where he was,” Briggs says. “Looking for high-velocity spatter, something to indicate if he was right here? Because why? Was he standing by his cryogenic freezer and just stuck a gun in his ear?”

  I take the light from him so I can direct it where I want as I look inside Fielding’s ear, and mostly what I see is dark dried blood that is crusty, but as I lean closer I can make out the small black entrance wound, a contact wound, and that is elongated. It is angled. A large amount of blood is under his head, a dried pool of it that is thick and looks sticky because the cellar is moist, and I smell blood that is beginning to break down, the sweetish foul odor that is faint, and I detect alcohol. It wouldn’t surprise me if Fielding was drinking in the end. Whether he shot himself or someone else did, he probably was compromised, and I remember the big SUV with the xenon lights that tailed Benton and me some sixteen hours ago while we were driving through a blizzard to the CFC. The current assumption is that Fielding was in that SUV, that it was his Navigator and he’d removed the front plate so we couldn’t tell who was behind us.

  Nobody has satisfactorily offered why he might have decided to tail Benton and me or how he managed to disappear instantly, seemingly in thin air, after Benton stopped in the middle of the snowy road in hopes whoever was on our bumper would pass us. I seem to be the only one consumed by the fact that Otwahl Technologies is very close to the area where the big SUV with xenon lights and fog lamps vanished, and if someone had a gate opener or code to that place or was familiar to the private police, that person could have tucked the Navigator in there, rather much like vanishing in the Bat Cave, is how I described it to Benton, who didn’t seem impressed. “Why would Jack Fielding have that kind of access to Otwahl?” I asked Benton as we were driving here. “Even if he was involved with some of the people who work there, would he have access to its parking lot? Could he have pulled in so quickly and been confident the private police who patrol the grounds would have been fine with it?”

  “With all the white-painted surfaces in here,” Briggs is saying to me, “you’d think we could find something that might indicate where the shooting occurred.”

  I look at Fielding’s hands. They are as cold as the stone in the cellar, and he is completely rigorous. As muscle-bound as he is, it is like moving the arms of a marble statue as I shine the flashlight on his thick, strong hands, examining them, noting his clean trimmed nails and surprised by them. I expected them to be dirty, as crazy and out of control as everyone believes he was. I notice his calluses, which he’s always had from using free weights in the gym or working on his cars or doing home repairs. It appears he died holding the pistol in his left hand, or it is supposed to look like he did, his fingers curled tightly and the impression in his palm made by the Glock’s nonslip stippled grip. But I don’t notice a fine mist of blood that might have blown back on his skin when he pulled the trigger. Back spatter is an artifact that can’t be staged or faked.

  “We’ll do GSR on his hands,” I comment, and I notice that Fielding isn’t wearing his wedding band. The last time I saw him, he had it on, but that was in August, and he was still living with his family, from what I understand.

  “The muzzle of the gun had blood,” Briggs tells me. “Internal muzzle staining from blood being sucked in.”

  The phenomenon is caused by explosive gases when the barrel of a gun is pressed against the skin and fired.

  “The ejected cartridge case?” I inquire.

  “Over there.” He indicates an area of the whitewashed floor about five feet from Fielding’s right knee.

  “And the gun? In what position?” I slide my hands under Fielding’s head and feel the hard lump of jagged metal under the scalp above his right ear, where the bullet exited his skull and is trapped under his skin.

  “Still gripped in his left hand. I’m sure you noticed the way his fingers are curled and the impression of the grip in his palm. We had to pry the gun out of his hand.”

  “I see. So he shot himself with his left hand even though he’s right-handed. Not impossible but unusual, and he either was already lying right here on the floor when he did it or fell with the gun still gripped in his hand. A cadaveric spasm and he clenched it hard. And fell neatly on his back just like this. Well, that’s quite a thing to imagine. You know me and cadaveric spasms, John.”

  “They do happen.”

  “Like winning the lottery,” I answer. “That happens, too. Just never to me.”

  I feel fractured bone shift beneath my fingers as I gently pal-pate Fielding’s head and envision a wound path that is upward and slightly back-to-front, the bullet lodging approximately three inches from the lower angle of his right jaw.

  “He shot himself like this?” I turn my left hand into a gun again, and point my purple nitrile-gloved index finger at an awkward angle, as if I’m going to shoot myself in the left ear. “Even if he held the pistol in his left hand when he wasn’t left-handed, it’s slightly awkward and unusual, the way my elbow has to be down and behind me, don’t you think? And I might expect a fine mist of back spatter on his hand. Of course, these things aren’t set in stone,” I say inside Fielding’s white-painted stone cellar.

  “Odd thing about shooting yourself in the ear,” I comment, “is people generally are squeamish because of the anticipated noise, not rational, because you’re about to die, anyway, but it’s human nature. Like shooting yourself in the eye. Almost nobody does.”

  “You and I need to talk, Kay,” Briggs says.

  “And most of all, the timing of when the cryogenic freezer was gone into,” I then say. “And the space heater turned on and what was burned upstairs, possibly Erica Donahue’s stationery. If Jack did all that before he killed himself, then why is there no semen or broken glass on the floor under him?” I am manipulating Fielding’s big body, and he is dead weight, completely stiff and unwilling as I move him a little, looking under him at a floor that is white and clean. “If he came down here and broke all these test tubes and then shot himself in the ear, there should be glass and semen under his body. It’s all around him but none under him. There’s a shard of glass in his hair.” I pick it out and look at it. “Someone broke all this after he was dead, after he was already lying here on the floor.”

  “He could have gotten glass in his hair when he broke test tubes, violently smashed everything,” Briggs says, and he sounds patient and kind for him. He almost seems to feel sorry for me. My insecurities again.

  “Do you have your mind made up, John? You and everyone else?” I look up into his compelling face.

  “You know damn better than that,” he says. “We have a lot to talk about, and I’d rather not do it here in front of the others. When you’re ready, I’ll be next door.”

  The power came back on in Salem Neck at about half past two, about the time I was finishing with Jack Fielding, kneeling next to him on that cold stone floor until my feet started tingling and my knees were aching and burning, despite the pads I had on.

  The flush-mounted lights in his old outdated kitchen are illuminated, the house quite chilly
but with the promise of warmth in the forced air I feel coming out of floor vents as I walk around in my tactical boots and field clothes and jacket, having taken off my protective gear except for disposable gloves. The white porcelain sink is filled with dishes, and the water is scummy with soap, a coagulated slick of yellowish grease floating on it, and the sheer yellow curtain covering the window over the sink is stained and dingy.

  Wherever I look I find remnants of food and garbage and hard drinking and am reminded of the squalor of countless scenes I’ve worked, of their rot and spoilage, their musty mildewy smells, of how often it is that the life preceding the death was the real crime. Fielding’s last months on earth were far more tortured than he deserved, and I can’t accept that he wanted anything he made for himself. This is not what he scripted for his ultimate destiny, it’s not what he was born to, and I continue thinking of that favorite phrase of his when he would remind me he wasn’t born to this or born to that, especially if I asked him to do something he found distasteful or boring.

  I pause by a wooden table with two wooden chairs beneath a window that faces the icy street and the choppy dark-blue water beyond it, and the table is deep in old newspapers and magazines that I spread around with my gloved hand. The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Salem News, as recent as Saturday, I note, and I recall seeing several papers covered with ice on the sidewalk in front, as if they were tossed there and no one brought them inside the house before the big storm. There are about half a dozen Men’s Health magazines, and I notice the mailing labels are for Fielding’s Concord address. The January and February issues were forwarded here, as was a lot of other mail in the pile I sift through. I recall that Fielding’s rental of the house in Concord began almost a year ago, and based on the clutter and furniture I recognize as his and what I’ve been told about his domestic problems, it would make sense that he didn’t renew the lease. He relocated to a drafty antique house that is completely lacking in charm because of the run-down condition it’s in, and while I can imagine what he envisioned when he fell in love with the place, something changed for him.

  What happened to you? I look around at the squalor he’s left in his wake. Who were you in the end? I envision his dead hands and remember their coldness and their rigor and how heavy they felt as I held them. They were clean, his nails well kempt, and that very small detail doesn’t seem to fit with everything else I’m seeing. Did you make this appalling mess? Or did someone else? Has some other person who is slovenly and crazed been inside your house? But I also know that consistency really is the hobgoblin of little minds, that what Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote is true. People aren’t easily explained or defined, and what they do isn’t always consistent. Fielding may very well have been falling apart along with everything around him but was still vain enough to have good hygiene. It could be true.

  But I’m not going to know. His CT scan, his autopsy won’t tell me. There’s so much I won’t know, including why he never told me about his place in Salem. Benton says that Fielding purchased the house right after he moved to Massachusetts, which was a year ago this past January, but he never mentioned it to me. I’m not sure he was hiding anything criminal he was up to or intended to be up to, but rather I have a feeling he wanted something that was just his, something that didn’t concern me and that I had no opinion about and wasn’t going to improve or change or help him with. He didn’t want my mentoring him as he set about to turn an eighteenth-century sea captain’s safe harbor into his own or into an investment or whatever he originally dreamed of having all to himself.

  If that’s the truth, then how sad, I think as I look out at water sparkling like sapphires, rolling and crashing against the gray, rocky shore across the icy, sandy street. I walk through a wide opening that once had pocket doors, into a dining room of exposed dark oak beams in a white plaster ceiling that is water-stained, noting that the tarnished brass hanging onion lantern belongs in an entryway, not over the walnut table, which is dusty and surrounded by chairs that don’t match and need new upholstery. I don’t blame Fielding for not wanting me here. I’m too critical, too sure of my goddamn good taste and informed opinions, and it’s no wonder I drove him to distraction. Not just an enabler but also a bad mother when I had no right to even be a good one. It wasn’t my place to be anything to him except a responsible boss, and if he were here I would tell him I’m sorry. I would ask him to forgive me for knowing him and caring, because what help was it? What damn good did I do?

  I focus on a disturbed area of dust at one end of the table, where someone was eating or working, perhaps where the Olivetti typewriter was, and the chair in front of it is in better shape than the others. Its faded threadbare red-velvet cushion is intact and probably safe to sit on, and I think about Fielding in here typing. I try to place him at this table with its old casement windows, the view in here a dreary one of the gravel drive, and it’s impossible for me to envision him hunched over in a small chair beneath a hanging lantern, typing a two-page letter over and over on engraved watermarked paper until he had a final version that was flawless.

  Fielding and his big, impatient fingers, and he was never much of a typist, was self-taught, what he called “hunt and pick” instead of hunt and peck, and the point of that document supposedly from Erica Donahue is illogical if it came from him. Considering the condition Fielding was in, based on what Benton saw when he met with him last week in my office, it doesn’t seem plausible to me that my deputy chief would have gone to such lengths to set up and frame a Harvard student for Mark Bishop’s homicide. Why would Fielding have killed that six-year-old boy? I don’t buy what Benton says, that Fielding was killing himself as a child when he drove nails into Mark Bishop’s head. Fielding was putting an end to his own childhood of abuse, Benton told me, and I’m not persuaded.

  But I have to remind myself that there are many things in life that make sense to the people who are doing them while the rest of us never figure it out. Even when we’re told why, the explanation often doesn’t fit with any template that has rhyme or reason. I pause before a casement window, not quite ready to leave this room and enter the next one, where I can hear Briggs walking around in his desert boots. He is talking to someone on his phone, and I pull out mine to check my text messages and see that there is one from Bryce.

  Can U call Evelyn!?

  I try her in the trace evidence lab and another microscopist answers, a young scientist named Matthew.

  “You anywhere near a computer?” Matthew’s voice, confident and tense with excitement. “Evelyn’s just down the hall in the ladies’ room, but we want to send you something totally weird, and I keep thinking it’s a mistake or like the weirdest contamination ever. You know a hair is about eighty thousand nanometers, right? So imagine something four nanometers, in other words, a hair would be twenty thousand times the diameter of what we found. And it’s not organic, even though the elemental fingerprint is mostly pure carbon, but we’ve also detected trace residues of what appears to be phencyclidine….”

  “You found PCP?” I interrupt his breathless talk.

  “PCP, angel dust, a really trace amount, just a miniscule amount. Using FTIR. At a magnification of one hundred, just plain ol’ light microscopy, and you can see the granules and a lot of other microscopic debris, especially cotton fibers, on the backing of the pain-relieving patch, okay? Probably some of these granular structures are PCP, maybe Nuprin, Motrin, too, whatever the patch originally was, possibly other chemicals there.”

  “Matthew, slow down.”

  “Well, at one hundred and fifty thousand X with SEM you’ll see what I’m talking about as big as a bread box, Dr. Scarpetta, what we want to send you.”

  “Go ahead, and if nothing else, I’ll go out to the truck and log in. Send PDFs, though, and I’ll try on my iPhone. What are you talking about, exactly?”

  “Sort of like buckyballs, like a dumbbell made out of bucky-balls but with legs. It’s definitely manmade, about the size of a strand of
DNA, like I said, four nanometers and pure carbon, except for whatever it was meant to deliver. And also traces of polyethylene glycol that we’re conjecturing was the outer coating for what was meant to be delivered.”

  “Explain the meant-to-deliver part. Something built on nanoscale to deliver a trace amount of PCP or what?”

  “This isn’t my area, obviously, and we don’t have an AFM, an atomic force microscope, here, hint, hint. Because I’d say we’ve just entered a new day where we have to start looking for things like this, things you might need to magnify millions of times. And in my opinion, something like an AFM would have to have been used to assemble this, do the nanoassembly, to manipulate the nanotubes, the nanoparticles, while you’re trying to get them to stick together, using a nanoprobe or whatever. Well, we could probably handle a lot of this with SEM, but an AFM would be a good idea if this is what’s headed down the pike and about to slam into us head-on, Dr. Scarpetta.”

  “You don’t know what you’ve found, but it’s a nanobot of some type, possibly, in your opinion, for the delivery of a drug or drugs? You found one on the film backing that was in the lab-coat pocket?” I don’t say whose lab coat.

  “Just one admixed with the particulate and fibers and other debris because we didn’t analyze the entire piece of film, just the specimen we mounted on a stub. The rest of the plastic film’s at fingerprints right now, and then it’s going to DNA, then to GC-Mass-Spec,” Matthew says. “And it’s broken or degraded.”

  “What is?”