Port Mortuary (12 page)

“Did you show the driver your identification?” I ask.

“What do you think?”

Of course Benton wouldn’t. “So he didn’t realize you’re not me.”

“Not from anything I did or said.”

“I guess Mrs. Donahue will continue to think Jack works for a man. Strange that Jack would tell her how to find me and not indicate how her driver might recognize me, at least indicate I’m not a man. Not even use pronouns that might indicate it. Strange. I don’t know.” I’m not convinced of what we’re conjecturing. It doesn’t feel right.

“I wasn’t aware you were having so many doubts about Jack. Not that they aren’t warranted.” Benton is trying to draw me out. The FBI agent in him. I’ve not seen it in a while.

“Just don’t say I’m twice bitten or thrice bitten or whatever. Please,” I say with feeling. “I’ve heard it enough today.”

“I’m saying I wasn’t aware.”

“And all I’ve been aware of is my usual misgivings and denials about him,” I reply. “I’ve not had sufficient information to be more concerned than usual.” My way of asking Benton to give me sufficient information if he has it, to not act like a cop or a mental-health practitioner.
Don’t hold back,
I’m telling him.

But he does hold back. He doesn’t say a word. His attention is fixed straight ahead, his profile sharp in the low illumination of the dashboard lights. This is the way it’s always been with us. We step around confidential and privileged information. We dance around secrets. At times we lie. In the beginning, we cheated, because Benton was married to someone else. Both of us know how to deceive. It isn’t something I’m proud of, and I wish it didn’t continue to be necessary professionally. Especially right this minute. Benton is dancing around secrets, and I want the truth. I need it.

“Look, we both know what he’s like, and yes, I’ve been invisible since the CFC opened,” I continue. “I’ve been in a vacuum, doing the best I can to handle things long distance while working eighteen-hour days, not even time to talk to my staff by phone. Everything’s been electronic, mostly e-mails and PDFs. I’ve hardly seen anyone. I should never have placed Jack in charge under the circumstances. When I hired him yet again and rode out of town, I set everyone up for exactly what’s happened. And you did tell me so, and you aren’t the only one.”

“You’ve never wanted to believe you’ve got a serious problem with him,” Benton says in a way that unsteadies me further. “Even if you’ve had plenty of them. Sometimes there’s simply no sufficient evidence that will make us accept a truth we can’t bear to believe. You can’t be objective when it comes to him, Kay. I’m not sure I’ve ever understood the reason.”

“You’re right, and I hate it.” I clear my throat and calm my voice. “And I’m sorry.”

“I just don’t know if I’ll ever figure it out.” He glances over at me, both hands on the wheel, and we’re alone on a snow-blown road that is poorly lit, driving through a snowy darkness. The Bentley is no longer visible up ahead. “I’m not judging you.”

“He wrecks his life and needs me again.”

“It’s not your fault he wrecks his life unless you haven’t told me something. Actually, no matter what, it wouldn’t be your fault. People wreck their own lives. They don’t need others to do it.”

“That’s not entirely true. He didn’t choose what happened to him as a child.”

“And that’s not your fault, either,” Benton says, as if he knows more about Fielding’s past than I’ve ever told him, what few details I have. I’ve always been careful not to probe my staff, especially not to probe Fielding. I know enough about his early tragedies to be mindful of what he might not want to talk about.

“Of course it sounds stupid,” I add.

“Not stupid. Just a drama that will always end the same way. I’ve never completely understood why you feel the need to act it out with him. I feel like something happened. Something you’ve not told me.”

“I tell you everything.”

“We both know that’s not true about either of us.”

“Maybe I should just stick with dead people.” I hear the bitterness in my tone, the resentment seeping through barriers I’ve carefully constructed most of my life. Maybe I don’t know how to live without them anymore. “I know how to handle dead people just fine.”

“Don’t talk like that,” Benton says quietly.

It’s because I’m tired,
I tell myself. It’s because of what happened this morning when the black mother of a dead black soldier disparaged me over the phone and called me names, referred to my following not the Golden Rule but the
White Rule.
Then Briggs tried to override my authority. It’s possible I’ve been set up by him. It’s possible he wants me to fail.

“It’s such a goddamn stereotype,” Benton then says.

“Funny thing about stereotypes. They’re usually based on something.”

“Don’t say things like that.”

“There won’t be any more problems with Jack. The drama will end, I promise. Assuming he hasn’t already ended it, hasn’t walked off the job. He’s certainly done that before. He has to be fired.”

“He’s not you, never was or could be, and he’s not your damn child.” Benton thinks it is as simple as that, but it isn’t.

“He has to be let go,” I answer.

“He’s a forty-six-year-old forensic pathologist who’s never earned the trust you show him or anything the hell you do for him.”

“I’m done with him.”

“You are done with him. I’m afraid that’s true and you’re going to have to let him go,” Benton says, as if a decision was made already, as if it isn’t up to me. “What is it you feel so guilty about?” There’s something in his tone, something about his demeanor. I can’t put my finger on what it is. “Way back in your Richmond days when you were just getting started with him. Why the guilt?”

“I’m sorry I’ve caused so many problems.” I evade his question. “I feel I’m the one who’s let everybody down. I’m sorry I’ve not been here. I can’t begin to express how sorry I am. I take responsibility for Jack, but I won’t allow it anymore.”

“Some things you can’t take responsibility for. Some things aren’t your fault, and I’m going to keep reminding you of that, and you’ll probably keep believing it’s your fault, anyway,” my husband the psychologist says.

I’m not going to discuss what is my fault and what isn’t, because I can’t talk about why I’ve always been irrationally loyal to Jack Fielding. I came back from South Africa, and my penance was Fielding. He was my public service, what I sentenced myself to as punishment. I was desperate to do right by him because I was convinced I’d wronged everyone else.

“I’m taking a look.” I mean at what is in Benton’s coat pocket. “I know how to look at a letter without compromising it, and I need to see what Mrs. Donahue wrote to me.”

I slide the envelope out, holding it lightly by its edges, and discover the flap is sealed with gray duct tape that partially covers an address engraved in an old-style serif typeface. I recognize the street as one in Boston’s Beacon Hill, near the Public Garden, very close to where Benton used to own a brownstone that was in his family for generations. On the front of the envelope is
Dr. Kay Scarpetta: Confidential
written elaborately with a fountain pen, and I’m careful about touching anything else with bare hands, especially the tape. It is a good source for fingerprints, for DNA and microscopic materials. Latent prints can be developed on porous surfaces such as paper by using a reagent such as ninhydrin, I calculate.

“Maybe you’ve got a knife handy.” I place the envelope in my lap. “And I need to borrow your gloves.”

Benton reaches across me and opens the glove box, and inside is a Leatherman multi-tool knife, a flashlight, a stack of napkins. He pulls a pair of deerskin gloves out of his coat pockets, and my hands are lost in them, but I don’t want to leave my fingerprints or eradicate those of someone else. I don’t turn on the map reading light, because the visibility is bad and getting worse. Illuminating what I’m doing with the flashlight, I slip a small blade into a corner of the envelope.

I slit it along the top and slide out two folded sheets of creamy stationery that are of heavy stock with a watermark I can’t make out clearly, what looks like some type of emblazonment or family crest. The letterhead is the same Beacon Hill address, and the two pages are typed with a typewriter that has a cursive typeface, which is something I haven’t seen in many years, maybe a decade at least. I read out loud:

I
return the sheets of heavy, stiff stationery to their envelope, then wrap the letter in napkins from the glove box to protect it as much as possible inside the zip-up compartment of my shoulder bag. If I have learned nothing else, it is that you can’t go back. Once potential evidence has been cut through, contaminated, or lost, it’s like an archaeologist’s trowel shattering an ancient treasure.

“She doesn’t seem to know you and I are married,” I comment as trees thrash in the wind along the roadside, snow swirling whitely.

“She might not,” Benton replies.

“Does her son know?”

“I don’t discuss you or my personal life with patients.”

“Then she may not know much about me.”

I try to work out how it might be possible that Erica Donahue wouldn’t tell her driver that the person he was to deliver the letter to is a small blonde woman, not a tall man with silver hair.

“She uses a typewriter, assuming she typed this herself,” I continue to deduce. “And anyone who would go to so much trouble taping up the envelope to ensure confidentiality probably isn’t going to let someone else type the letter. If she still uses a typewriter, it’s unlikely she goes on the Internet and Googles. The watermarked engraved stationery, the fountain pen, the cursive typeface, possibly a purist, someone very precise, who has a very certain and set way of doing things.”