Port Mortuary (22 page)

She goes on to assure me that Marino knows nothing about her going to Norton’s Woods. He is unaware of the tiny mechanical wing or that it was a motivating factor in her encouraging him to bring me home from Dover early, to safely escort me in her helicopter. She didn’t mention any of this to me until now, she continues to explain, because she doesn’t trust anyone at the moment. Except Benton, she adds. And me, she adds. And she’s very careful where she has certain conversations, and all of us should be careful.

“Unless the area has been cleared,” she says, and what she means is swept, and the implication is that my office is safe or we wouldn’t be having this conversation inside it.

“You checked my office for surveillance devices?” I’m not shocked. Lucy knows how to sweep an area for hidden recorders because she knows how to spy. The best burglar is a locksmith. “Because you think who might be interested in bugging my office?”

“Not sure who’s interested in what or why.”

“Not Marino,” I then say.

“Well, that would be as obvious as a RadioShack nanny cam if he did it. Of course not. I’m not worried about him doing something like that. I just worry that he can’t keep his mouth shut,” Lucy replies. “At least not when it comes to certain people.”

“You talked about MORT in the helicopter. You weren’t worried about the intercom, about Marino, when it came to MORT.”

“Not the same thing. Not even close,” she says. “Doesn’t matter if Marino runs his mouth to certain people about a robot in the guy’s apartment. Other people already know about it, you can rest assured of that. I can’t have Marino talk about my little friend.” She looks at the small white box. “And he wouldn’t mean anything bad. But he doesn’t understand certain realities about certain people. Especially General Briggs and Captain Avallone.”

“I didn’t realize you know anything about her.” I’ve never mentioned Sophia Avallone to Lucy.

“When she was here. Jack showed her around. Marino bought her lunch, was kissing her uniformed ass. He doesn’t get it about people like that, about the fucking Pentagon, for that matter, or someone he stupidly assumes is one of us, you know, is safe.”

I’m relieved she realizes it, but I don’t want to encourage her to distrust Marino, not even slightly. She’s been through enough with him and finally they are friends again, close like they were when she was a child and he taught her to drive his truck and to shoot and she aggravated the hell out of him and it was mutual. She gets science from my genetics, but she gets her affinity for cop stuff, as she refers to it, from him. He was the big, tough detective in her life when she was a know-it-all difficult wunderkind, and he has loved and hated her as many different times as she has loved and hated him. But friends and colleagues now. Whatever it takes to keep it that way.
Be careful what you say,
I tell myself.
Let there be peace.

“From which I conclude Briggs doesn’t know about this.” I indicate the small white box on my desk. “And Captain Avallone doesn’t.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Is my office bugged right now?”

“Our conversation is completely safe,” she replies, and it isn’t an answer.

“What about Jack? Possible he knows about the flybot? Well, you didn’t tell him.”

“No damn way.”

“So unless someone’s called him looking for it. Or maybe its wing.”

“You mean if the killer called here looking for a missing flybot,” Lucy says. “And I’m just going to call it that for purposes of simplicity, although it’s not just a garden-variety flybot. That would be pretty stupid. That would imply the caller had something to do with the guy’s homicide.”

“We can’t rule out anything. Sometimes killers are stupid,” I reply. “If they’re desperate enough.”

L
ucy gets up and goes into my private bathroom, where there is a single-cup coffeemaker on a counter. I hear her filling the tank with tap water and checking the small refrigerator. It is almost one a.m. and the snow hasn’t eased up, is falling hard and fast, and when the small flakes blow against the windows, the sound is like sand blasting the glass.

“Skim milk or cream?” Lucy calls out from what is supposed to be my private changing area, which includes a shower. “Bryce is such a good wife. He stocked your refrigerator.”

“I still drink it black.” I start opening my desk drawers, not sure what I’m looking for.

I think about my sloppy work station in the autopsy room. I think of people helping themselves to what they shouldn’t.

“Yeah, well, then why is there milk and cream?” Lucy’s loud voice. “Green Mountain or Black Tiger? There’s also hazelnut. Since when do you drink hazelnut?” The questions are rhetorical. She knows the answers.

“Since never,” I mutter, seeing pencils, pens, Post-its, paper clips, and in a bottom drawer, a pack of spearmint gum.

It is half-full, and I don’t chew gum. Who likes spearmint gum and would have reason to go into my desk? Not Bryce. He’s much too vain to chew gum, and if I caught him doing it, I would disapprove, because I consider it rude to chew gum in front of other people. Besides, Bryce wouldn’t root around inside my desk, not without permission. He wouldn’t dare.

“Jack likes hazelnut, French vanilla, shit like that, and he drinks it with skim milk unless he’s on one of his high-protein, high-fat diets,” Lucy continues from inside my bathroom. “Then he uses real cream, heavy cream, like what’s in here. I suppose if you had guests, were expecting visitors, you might have cream.”

“Nothing flavored, and please make it strong.”

“He’s a superuser just like you are,” Lucy’s voice then says. “His fingerprints are stored in every lock in this place just like yours are.”

I hear the spewing of hot water shooting through the K-Cup and use it as a welcome interruption. I refuse to engage in the poisonous speculation that Jack Fielding has been in my office during my absence, that maybe he’s been helping himself while he drinks coffee, chews gum, or who the hell knows what he’s been up to. But as I look around, it doesn’t seem possible. My office feels unlived-in. It certainly doesn’t appear as if anyone has been working in here, so what would he be doing?

“I went over to Norton’s Woods before Cambridge PD did, you know. Marino asked them to go back because of the serial number being eradicated from the Glock. But I got there first.” Lucy talks on loudly from inside the bathroom. “But I had the disadvantage of not knowing exactly where the guy went down, where he was stabbed, we now know. Without the scene photographs, it’s impossible to get an exact location, just an approximate one, so I combed every footpath in the park.”

She walks out with steaming coffee in black mugs that have the AFME’s unusual crest, a five-card poker draw of aces and eights, known as the dead man’s hand, what Wild Bill Hickok supposedly was holding when he was shot to death.

“Talk about a needle in a haystack,” she continues. “The flybot’s probably half the size of a small paper clip, about the size of, well, a housefly. No joy.”

“Just because you found a wing doesn’t mean the rest of it was ever out there,” I remind her as she sets a coffee in front of me.

“If it’s out there, it’s maimed.” Lucy returns to her chair. “Under snow as we speak and missing a wing. But very possibly still alive, especially when it gets exposed to light, assuming it’s not further damaged.”

“‘Alive’?”

“Not literally. Likely powered by micro-solar panels as opposed to a battery that would already be dead. Light hits it and abracadabra. That’s the way everything is headed. And our little friend, wherever he is, is futuristic, a masterpiece of teeny-tiny technology.”

“How can you be so sure if you can’t find most of it? Just a wing.”

“Not just any wing. The angle and flexure joints are ingenious and suggest to me a different flight formation. Not the flight of an angel anymore. But horizontal like a real insect flies. Whatever this thing is and whatever its function, we’re talking about something extremely advanced, something I’ve never seen before. Nothing’s been published about it, because I get pretty much every technical journal there is online, plus I’ve been running searches with no success. By all indications, it’s a project that’s classified, top secret. I sure hope the rest of it is out there on the ground somewhere, safely covered with snow.”

“What was it doing in Norton’s Woods in the first place?” I envision the black-gloved hand entering the frame of the hidden video camera, as if the man was swatting at something.

“Right. Did he have it, or did someone else?” She blows on her coffee, holding the mug in both hands.

“And is someone looking for it? Does someone think it’s here or think we know where it is?” I ask that again. “Has anyone mentioned to you that his gloves are gone? Did you happen to notice when you were downstairs while Marino was printing the body? It appears the victim put on a pair of black gloves as he arrived at the park, which I thought was curious when I watched the video clips. I assume he died with the gloves on, and so where are they?”

“That’s interesting,” Lucy says, and I can’t tell if she already knew the gloves are missing.

I can’t tell what she knows and if she’s lying.

“They weren’t in the woods when I was walking around yesterday morning,” she informs me. “I would have seen a pair of black gloves, saying they were accidentally left by the squad, the removal service, the cops. Of course, they could have been and were picked up by anybody who happened along.”

“In the video clips, someone wearing a long, black coat walks past right after the man falls to the ground. Is it possible whoever killed him paused just long enough to take his gloves?”

“You mean if they’re some type of data gloves or smart gloves, what they’re using in combat, gloves with sensors embedded in them for wearable computer systems, wearable robotics,” Lucy says, as if it is a normal thing to consider about a pair of missing gloves.

“I’m just wondering why his gloves might be important enough for someone to take them, if that’s what’s happened,” I reply.

“If they have sensors in them and that’s how he was controlling the flybot, assuming the flybot is his, then the gloves would be extremely important,” Lucy says.

“And you didn’t ask about the gloves when you were downstairs with Marino? You didn’t think to check gloves, clothing, for sensors that might be embedded?”

“If I had the gloves, I would have had a much better chance of finding the flybot when I went back to Norton’s Woods,” Lucy says. “But I don’t have them or know where they are, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I am asking that because it would be tampering with evidence.”

“I didn’t. I promise. I don’t know for a fact that the gloves are data gloves, but if they are, it would make sense in light of other things. Like what he’s saying on the video clip right before he dies,” she adds thoughtfully, working it out, or maybe she’s already worked it out but is leading me to believe what she’s saying is a new thought. “The man keeps saying ‘Hey, boy.’”

“I assumed he was talking to his dog.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“And he said other things I couldn’t figure out,” I recall. “‘And for you’ or ‘Do you send one’ or something like that. Could a robotic fly understand voice commands?”

“Absolutely possible. That part was muffled. I heard it, too, and thought it was confusing,” Lucy says. “But maybe not if he was controlling the flybot. ‘For you’ could be
four-two,
maybe, as in the number four? ‘And’ could be ‘N,’ as in north? I’ll listen again and do more enhancement.”

“More?”

“I’ve done some. Nothing helpful. Could be he was telling the flybot GPS coordinates, which would be a common command to give a device that responds to voice—if you’re telling it where to go, for example.”

“If you could figure out GPS coordinates, maybe you could find the location, find where it is.”

“Sincerely doubt it. If the flybot was controlled by the gloves, at least partially controlled by sensors in them, then when the victim waved his hand, probably at the moment he was stabbed?”

“Right. Then what.”

“I don’t know, but I don’t have the flybot, and I don’t have the gloves,” Lucy says to me while looking at me intently, her eyes directly on mine. “I didn’t find them, but I sure wish I had.”

“Did Marino mention that someone may have been following Benton and me after we left Hanscom?” I ask.

“We looked for the big SUV with xenon lights and fog lamps. I’m not saying it means anything, but Jack’s got a dark-blue Navigator. Pre-owned, bought it back in October. You weren’t here, so I guess you haven’t seen it.”

“Why would Jack follow us? And no. I don’t know anything about him buying a Navigator. I thought he had a Jeep Cherokee.”

“Traded up, I guess.” She drinks her coffee. “I didn’t say he would follow you or did. Or that he would be stupid enough to ride your bumper. Except in a blizzard or fog, when visibility’s really bad, a rather inexperienced tail might follow too close if the person doesn’t know where the target is going. I don’t see why Jack would bother. Wouldn’t he assume you were on your way here?”

“Do you have an idea why anyone would bother?”

“If someone knows the flybot is missing,” she says, “he or she sure as hell’s looking for it, and possibly would spare nothing to find it before it gets into the wrong hands. Or the right hands. Depending on who or what we’re dealing with. I can say that much based on a wing. If that’s why you were followed, it would make me less likely to suspect that whoever killed this guy found the flybot. In other words, it could very well still be missing or lost. I probably don’t need to tell you that a top-secret proprietary technical invention like this could be worth a fortune, especially if someone could steal the idea and take credit for it. If such a person is looking for it and has reason to fear it may have come in with the body, maybe this person wanted to see where you were going, what you were up to. He or she might think the flybot is here at the CFC or might think you have it off-site somewhere. Including at your house.”