Port Mortuary

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Up here we got about four inches already,” Mr. Pieste says after a while, after he’s heard enough. “That on top of ice. Did you get the ice down there in Cambridge?”

  “I guess we should complain about this to someone,” Mrs. Pieste says. “Does it matter how long it’s been?”

  “It never matters how long it’s been when you’re talking about the truth,” I reply. “And there’s no statute of limitation on homicide.”

  “I just hope they didn’t lock up someone who shouldn’t have been,” Mrs. Pieste then says.

  “The cases have remained unsolved. Attributed to black gang members but no arrests,” I tell them.

  “But it was probably someone white,” she says.

  “Someone white was drinking beer inside the apartment, that much I can say with reasonable certainty.”

  “Do you know who did it?” she asks.

  “Because we would want them punished,” her husband says.

  “I only know the type of people who likely did it. Cowardly people all about power and politics. And you should do what you feel, what’s in your heart.”

  “Eddie, what do you think?”

  “I’ll write a letter to Senator Chappel.”

  “You know how much good that will do.”

  “Then to Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden. I’ll write everyone,” he says.

  “What will anybody do about it now?” Mrs. Pieste says to her husband. “I don’t know that I can live through it again, Eddie.”

  “Well, I need to go clear the walk again,” he says. “Got to stay on top of the snow, and it’s really coming down. Thank you for your time and trouble, ma’am,” he says to me. “And for going ahead and telling us. I know that wasn’t an easy decision, and I’m sure my daughter would appreciate it if she was here to tell you herself.”

  After I hang up, I sit on the bed for a while, the paperwork and photographs back in the gray accordion file they’ve been in for more than two decades. I’ll return the file to the safe in the basement, I decide. But not now. I don’t feel like going down into the basement and into that safe right now, and I think someone has just pulled into our driveway. I hear snow crunching, and I’m not in a good state of mind to see whoever it is. I’ll stay up here for a little while longer. Maybe make a grocery list or contemplate errands or just pet Sock for a minute or two.

  “I can’t take you for a walk,” I tell him.

  He is curled up next to me, his head on my thigh, unperturbed by the sad conversation he just overheard and having no idea what it says about the world he lives in. But then he knows cruelty, maybe knows it better than the rest of us.

  “No walks without a coat,” I go on, petting him, and he yawns and licks my hand, and I hear the beeping of the alarm being disarmed, then the front door shuts. “I think we’re going to try boots,” I tell Sock as Marino’s and Benton’s voices drift up from the entryway. “You probably aren’t going to like these little shoes they make for dogs and are likely to get quite annoyed with me, but I promise it’s a good thing. Well, we have company.” I recognize Marino’s heavy footsteps on the stairs. “You remember him from yesterday, in the big truck. The big man in yellow who gets on my nerves most of the time. But for future reference, you have no reason to be afraid of him. He’s not a bad person, and as you may be aware, people who have known each other for a very long time tend to be ruder to each other than they are to people they don’t like half as much.”

  “Anybody home?” Marino’s big voice precedes him into the bedroom as the doorknob turns, and then he knocks as he opens the door. “Benton said you was decent. Who were you talking to? You on the phone?”

  “He’s clairvoyant, then,” I reply from the bed, where I’m under the covers, nothing but pajamas on. “And I’m not on the phone and wasn’t talking to anyone.”

  “How’s Sock? How ya doing, boy?” he then says before I can answer. “How come he smells funny? What did you put on him, flea medicine? This time of year? You look okay. How are you feeling?”

  “I cleaned his ears.”

  “So how are you doing, Doc?”

  Marino looms over me, and his presence seems larger than usual because he’s in a heavy parka and a baseball cap and hiking boots while I’m in nothing but flannel, modestly tucked under a blanket and a duvet. He has a small black case in his hands that I recognize as Lucy’s iPad, unless he’s managed to get one of his own, which I doubt.

  “I didn’t get hurt. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’ve just been staying in this morning, taking care of a few things,” I say to him. “I’m assuming Dawn Kincaid is fine. Last I heard, she was stable.”

  “Stable? You’re joking, right?”

  “I’m talking about her physical condition. The reattachment of her finger and the damage to the rest of them, the other three that were cut so severely. It’s probably a good thing for her it was so cold in the garage. And, of course, we thought to pack her hand and her severed finger in ice. I’m hoping that helped. Do you know? I haven’t heard a word. What’s her status? I’ve not heard any reports since she was admitted last night.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Marino’s eyes look at me, and they’re just as bloodshot as they were yesterday in Salem.

  “I’m not kidding. Nobody’s told me a word. Benton said earlier he would check, but I don’t think he has.”

  “He’s been on the phone with us all morning.”

  “Maybe you’d be so kind as to call the hospital and check.”

  “Like I give a flying fuck if she loses a finger or all of her damn fingers,” Marino says. “Why would you give a fuck? You afraid she’ll sue you? That must be it, and wouldn’t that figure? She probably will. Will sue you for maybe losing the use of her hand so she can’t build nanobots or whatever anymore, a psycho like that. I guess psychopaths are stable in the mental-illness sense of the word. Can you be crazy and a psychopath? And still be put together well enough to work at a place like Otwahl? Her case is going to be one big damn problem. If she gets out, well, can you imagine?”

  “Why would she get out?”

  “I’m just telling you the case is going to be a problem. You won’t be safe if she’s on the loose again. None of us will be.”

  He helps himself to the foot of the bed, and the bed sinks and it feels like I’m suddenly sitting uphill as he makes himself comfortable, petting Sock and informing me that the police and the FBI found the “rat hole” Dawn Kincaid had rented, a one-bedroom apartment in Revere, just outside of Boston, where she stayed when she wasn’t with Eli Goldman or with her biological father, Jack Fielding, or whoever else she had entangled in her web at any point in time. Marino slips the iPad out of its case and turns it on as he lets me know that he and Lucy and quite a number of other investigators have been searching the rat-hole apartment for hours, going through Dawn’s computer and everything she has, including everything she’s stolen.

  “What about her mother?” I ask. “Has anybody talked to her?”

  “Dawn’s been in contact with her for a number of years, visiting her in prison down there in Georgia now and then. Reconnected with her and with Fielding on and off over the years. Latches on when she wants something, a first-class manipulator and user.”

  “But does the mother know what’s happened up here?”

  “Why do you care what a fucking child molester thinks?”

  “Her relationship with Jack wasn’t that simple. It’s not as easily explained as you so eloquently just put it. I’d hate for her to hear about him on the news.”

  “Who gives a shit.”

  “I never want anybody to find out that way,” I reply. “I don’t care who it is. Her relationship with him wasn’t simple,” I repeat. “Relationships like that never are.”

  “Plain and simple to me. Black and white.”

  “If she hears it on the news,” I reply, and I realize I’m perseverating. “I always hate for that to happen. Such an inhumane way for people to find out terr
ible things like this. That’s my concern.”

  “A klepto,” Marino then says, because his only interest is the case and what the investigators have been discovering at Dawn Kincaid’s apartment.

  Apparently, she is a bona fide klepto, to quote Marino. Someone who seemed to have taken souvenirs from all sorts of people, he goes on, including items stolen from people we have no idea about. But some of what investigators have found so far has been identified as jewelry and rare coins from the Donahue house, and also several rare autographed musical manuscripts that Mrs. Donahue had no idea were missing from the family library.

  Recovered from a locked chest in a closet in Dawn’s apartment were guns believed to have been removed from Fielding’s collection, and his wedding band. Also in this same trunk a martial-arts carry bag, I’m told, and inside it, a black satin sash, a white uniform, sparring gear, a lunch bag filled with rusty L-shaped flooring nails, and a hammer, and a pair of boys Adidas tae kwon do shoes believed to be the ones Mark Bishop was wearing while practicing kicks in his backyard the late afternoon he was killed. Although no one is quite certain how Dawn lured the boy into lying facedown and allowing her to play some gruesome game with him that included “pretending” to hammer nails into his head, or more specifically, the first nail.

  “The one that went in right here,” Marino continues speculating, pointing to the space between the back of his neck and the base of his skull. “That would have killed him instantly, right?”

  “If we must use that phrase,” I reply.

  “I mean, she probably helped him in some of Fielding’s Tiny Tiger classes, maybe?” he continues to spin the story. “So the kid’s familiar with her, looks up to her, and she’s hot, I mean really good-looking. If it was me, I’d tell the kid I’m going to show him a new move or something and to lie down in the yard. And of course the kid’s going to do what an expert says, what someone teaching him says, and he lies down and it’s almost dark out and then boom! It’s over.”

  “Someone like that can never get out,” I reply. “She’ll do more and do it worse next time, if that’s even possible.”

  “Denying everything. She’s not talking, except to say Fielding did it all and she’s innocent.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “I’m with you.”

  “She’s going to have a hard time explaining what’s in her apartment,” I point out, as I continue going through photographs. Marino must have taken hundreds.

  “She’s good-looking and charming and smart as hell. And Fielding’s dead.”

  “Incriminating.” I’ve said this several times as I look through the photographs on the iPad. “Should be very helpful to the prosecution. I’m not sure why you think the case will be a problem.”

  “It’s going to be. The defense will pin it all on Fielding. The psycho bitch will get a dream team of big-shot lawyers, and they’ll make the jury believe Fielding did all of it.” Marino leans closer to me, and the slope of the bed changes again, and Sock is snoring quietly, not interested in his former owner or her rat hole, which has a dog bed in it, Marino shows me.

  He leans close to me, clicking through several photographs of the dog’s plaid bed and several toys, and I indicate I’d rather look at the photographs myself. He and Sock are on top of me, and I’m feeling smothered.

  “I just thought I’d show you, since I’m the one who took them,” Marino says.

  “Thank you. I’ll manage. You did a very good job with the photographs.”

  “Point is, it’s obvious the dog stayed here.” Marino means Sock stayed in Dawn Kincaid’s rat hole. “And also with Eli and with Fielding,” he adds. “To give her credit, I guess she liked her dog.”

  “She left him in Jack’s house with no heat and all alone.” I click through photographs that are overwhelmingly incriminating.

  “She doesn’t give a shit unless it suits her. When it doesn’t, she gets rid of it one way or another. So she cared about him when it suited her.”

  “That’s the more likely story,” I agree.

  I look at photographs of an unmade double bed, then other pictures of a tiny bedroom shockingly filled with junk, as if Dawn Kincaid is a hoarder.

  “Plus, she had another reason to leave him,” Marino goes on. “If she leaves the dog at Fielding’s house, then maybe we think he’s the one who killed everyone, then killed himself. The dog is there. His red leash is there. The boat that was probably used to dump Wally Jamison’s body is there, and Wally’s clothes and the murder weapon are in Fielding’s basement. The Navigator with the missing front plate is there. You’re supposed to think Fielding was following you and Benton when you left Hanscom. Fielding’s deranged. He’s watching you. He’s following you, trying to intimidate you, or spying, or maybe he was going to kill you, too.”

  “He was dead by the time we were followed. Although I can’t be exact about time of death, I’m calculating he’d been dead since Monday afternoon, probably was murdered not long after he got home to Salem after leaving the CFC with the Glock he’d removed from the lab. It was Dawn in the Navigator tailing us Monday night. She’s the one deranged. She rode our bumper to make sure we knew we were being followed, then disappeared, probably ducked out of sight in Otwahl’s parking lot. So eventually we’d think it was Jack, who in fact already had been murdered by her with a pistol she probably gave to her boyfriend, Eli, before she murdered him, too. But you’re right. It’s likely she’s tried to set things up so all of it got blamed on Jack, who isn’t around to defend himself. She set up Jack and made it look like he was setting up Johnny Donahue. It’s terrifying. “

  “You got to make the jury buy it.”

  “That’s always the challenge, no matter the case.”

  “It’s bad the dog was at Fielding’s house,” Marino repeats. “It connects him to Eli’s murder. Hell, it’s on video clips that Eli was walking the dog when he was whacked.”

  “The microchip,” I remind him. “It traces back to Dawn, not to Jack.”

  “Doesn’t mean anything. He kills Eli and then takes the dog, and the dog would know Fielding, right?” Marino says, as if Sock isn’t inches away from him, sleeping with his head on my leg. “The dog would be familiar with Fielding because Dawn was staying over there in Salem, had the dog at Fielding’s house some of the time or whatever. So Fielding kills Eli, then takes the dog as he walks off, or this is what Dawn wants us to think.”

  “It’s not what happened. Jack didn’t kill anyone,” as I conclude that Dawn’s apartment has the same brand of squalor that I observed at Fielding’s house in Salem.

  Clutter and boxes everywhere. Clothes piled in mounds and strewn in odd places. Dishes piled in the sink. Trash overflowing. Mounds of newspapers, computer printouts, magazines, and on a dining-room table, a large number of items tagged and placed there by police, including a GPS-enabled sports watch that is the same model as one I gave Fielding for his birthday several years ago, and a Civil War military dissection set in a rosewood case that is identical to one I gave him when he worked for me in Richmond.

  There is a close-up of a pair of black gloves, one of them with a small black box on the wrist, what Marino describes as lightweight flexible wireless data gloves with built-in accelerometers, thirty-six sensors, and an ultra-low-profile integrated transmitter-receiver, only I have to infer all this, sift it out of his mispronunciations and mangled descriptions. The gloves, which were closely examined by both Briggs and Lucy at the scene, are clearly intended for gesture-based robotic control—specifically, to control the flybot that Eli had with him when he was murdered by the woman who had given him the stolen signet ring he was wearing when his body came to the CFC.

  “Then the flybot was in her apartment,” I presume. “And did Benton offer you any coffee?”

  “I’m coffeed out. Some of us haven’t been to bed yet.”

  “I’m in bed working. Doesn’t mean I’ve slept.”

  “Must be nice. I’d like to stay home and work in be
d.” He takes the iPad from me and searches through files.

  “Maybe we could adjust your job description. You can stay home and work in bed a certain number of days each year, depending on your age and decrepitude, which we’ll have to evaluate. I suppose I’ll be the one to evaluate it.”

  “Oh, yeah? Who’s gonna evaluate yours?” He finds a photograph he wants me to see.

  “Mine doesn’t need evaluating. It’s obvious to one and all.”

  He shows me a close-up of the flybot, only at a glance it’s hard to know what it is, just a shiny wiry object on a square of white paper on Dawn Kincaid’s dining-room table. The micromechanical device could be an earring, it occurs to me. A silver earring that was stepped on, which is exactly what is suspected, Marino tells me. Lucy thinks the flybot was stepped on while the EMTs were working on Eli, then later, Dawn found it when she returned to Norton’s Woods, possibly wearing the same long, black wool coat that she had on in my garage, a coat that I believe was Fielding’s. A witness claims to have observed a young man or woman, the person wasn’t sure which, in a big black coat walking around Norton’s Woods with a flashlight, several hours after Eli Goldman died there. The individual in the big coat was out there alone, and the person who saw him or her thought it was strange because he or she did not have a dog and seemed to be looking for something while making odd hand gestures.

  “It must have been huge on her and practically dragged on the ground,” Marino says, getting up from the bed. “I’m not saying she was trying to look like a man, but with her short hair and the big coat, and a hat and glasses on or whatever? As long as you don’t see her rack. She’s got quite a rack. Has that in common with her dad, right?”

  “I’ve never known Jack to have large breasts.”

  “I mean both of them built.”