Port Mortuary (35 page)

“If I get stuck here…” I start to say I might take him up on it.

“We really do need to arrange some sort of closet for you, a little haute couture at HQ. Ohhhh, wardrobe?” his voice sings out as he makes coffee. “Now if we had our own show, we’d have wardrobe, hair, makeup, and you’d never find yourself in the same dirty clothes and odiferous of death, not that I’m saying you’re… Well, anyway. Best of all would be if you went home and straight to bed.” As hot water shoots loudly through a K-Cup. “Or I could run out and get you something to eat. I find when I’m tired and sleep-deprived…” He emerges from my bathroom with two coffees and says, “Fat. There’s a time and a place for everything. Dunkin’ Donuts, their croissant with sausage and egg, how ‘bout it? You might need two. You actually look a little thin. Life in the military really doesn’t suit you, dear boss.”

“Are you aware of a woman named Erica Donahue calling here?” I ask him as I return to my desk with a coffee I’m not sure I should drink. Opening a drawer, I search for Advil in hopes there really might be a bottle hiding somewhere.

“She did. Several times.” Bryce carefully sips the hot coffee, leaning against the frame of the open doorway that connects us.

When he offers nothing else, I ask, “When did she call?”

“Starting after it was in the news about her son. That was a week ago, I think, when he confessed to killing Mark Bishop.”

“You talked to her?”

“Most recently, all I really did was direct her call to Jack again when she was looking for you.”

“‘Again’?”

“You should get his part from him. I don’t know his details,” Bryce says, and it’s not like him to be careful with me. He’s cautious suddenly.

“But he talked to her.”

“This was, let me see….” He has a habit of gazing up at the dome as if the answers to all things are there. It’s also a favorite delaying tactic of his. “Last Thursday.”

“And you talked to her. Before you transferred her call to Jack.”

“Mostly I listened.”

“What was her demeanor, and what did she say?”

“Very polite, sounded like the upper-class intelligent woman she is, based on what I hear. I mean, there’s a ton of stuff about the Donahue family and Johnny Hinckley Junior. He’s almost that notorious….
And when he saw what he had done, he holstered his trusty nail gun….
But you probably don’t read all this shit on these gore-sites like
Morbidia Trivia, Wicked-whatever-pedia, Crypt-notes,
or whatever, and I do have to follow them as part of my job, part of my being informed about what’s being said out there in sensational sin-loving cyberland.”

He’s comfortable again. He’s uncomfortable only when I probe him about Fielding.

“Mom was an almost famous concert pianist in a former life, played in a symphony orchestra. I think in San Francisco,” Bryce goes on. “I happened to notice some Twittering about her being taught by Yundi Li, but I seriously doubt Li gives lessons, and he’s only twenty-eight, so I don’t believe it for a second. Of course she’s in an uproar, can you imagine? They say her son is a savant, has these bizarre abilities, like knowing tire treads. The detective from Salem, Saint Hilaire, who is anything but, and you don’t know him yet, was talking about it. Apparently, Johnny Donahue can look at a tread pattern in a dirt parking lot and go, ‘That’s a Bridgestone Battle Wing front motorcycle tire.’ I just came up with that because Ethan has those on his BMW, which I wish he didn’t love so much, because to me they’re all donorcycles. Supposedly, Johnny can do math problems in his head, and I’m not talking if a banana costs eighty-nine cents how much is a bunch of six? More Einsteinian, like what is nine times a hundred and three to the square root of seven or something? But then you probably know all this. I’m sure you’ve been keeping up with the case.”

“What exactly did she want to discuss with me? Did she tell you?” I know Bryce. He wouldn’t hand off someone like Erica Donahue without letting her talk until she ran out of words or patience. He’s too much of a snoop, his mind a chatterbox gossip mill.

“Well, obviously he didn’t do it, and if someone would really look into the facts without having their mind made up, they’d see all the inconsistencies. The conflicts,” Bryce replies, blowing on his coffee, not looking at me.

“What conflicts, exactly?”

“She says she talked to him the day of the murder at around nine in the morning, before he headed off to that cafe in Cambridge that’s now become so famous right around the corner from you?” Bryce continues. “The Biscuit? Lines out the door because of all the publicity. Nothing like a murder. Anyway, he wasn’t feeling well that day, according to Mom. Has terrible allergies or something and was complaining his pills or shots or whatever weren’t working anymore, and he was dosing up big-time and felt
punk
is the word she used. So I guess if someone has itchy eyes and a runny nose, he’s not going to kill anyone. I didn’t want to tell her that a jury wouldn’t put much stock in a sneezy defense—”

“I need to make a call and then make my rounds,” I cut him off before he digresses the rest of the day. “Can you check with Trace Evidence and see if Evelyn is in, and if so, please tell her I have a few things that are rather urgent. What I’ve got needs to start with her and then fingerprints, then DNA, then toxicology, then one item in particular will come back up here to Lucy’s lab. There was no one over there a while ago. What about Shane, are we expecting him, because I’m going to need an opinion about a document?”

“It’s not like we’re a rugby team stranded in a blizzard in the Andes and are going to resort to cannibalism, for God’s sake.”

“It was quite a storm all night.”

“You’ve been down south too long. There’s what? Eight inches? A bit icy but nothing for around here,” Bryce says.

“Actually, if you could ask Evelyn to come upstairs immediately and let her into Jack’s office.” I decide I’m not going to wait as I remember the lab coat folded up inside the trash-can liner.

I explain to Bryce what’s in the pocket and that I want it checked right away on SEM and I also want a nondestructive chemical analysis.

“Be very, very careful not to open the bag and touch anything,” I say to Bryce. “And tell Evelyn there are fingerprints on the plastic film. Meaning there will also be DNA.”

With my administrator silently out of range on the other side of our shared shut door, I decide to hold off calling Erica Donahue until I have a chance to think about what I’m going to do. I need to think about everything.

I want to reread her letter and make sure of my intentions, and as I ponder and remember what’s happened since I left Dover, as I look out at the bright-blue sky of a new day, I know I’m still hungover from the last mother I dealt with. I feel poisoned by the memory of Julia Gabriel on the phone as someone loitered outside my closed door at Port Mortuary. The names she called me and what she accused me of were bitter and vile, but I didn’t really let it get to me in a way that gave power to her words until I found what I did in Fielding’s office. Since then a shadow that is chilled and dark like a sunless part of the moon is at the back of my thoughts and moods. I don’t know what is being said or decided about me or what has been resurrected like some cold-blooded thing that never died and now is stirring.

What records have been found, and what has been gone through that I have secretly feared all these years and at the same time forgotten? Although the truth was always there, like something unseemly out of sight in a closet, something that I never look for but, if reminded, I know it’s not gone, because it was never thrown out or returned to its rightful owner, which should never have been me. But the ugly matter was handed over as if it was mine. And it was left hanging. As long as what was done in South Africa stayed hidden in my closet instead of where it belonged, I’d be fine was the message I got when I returned to Walter Reed after working those two deaths and was thanked for my service to the AFIP, to the air force, and was free to leave early. Debt paid in full. They had just the position for me in Virginia, where I would prosper as long as I remembered loyalty and took my dirty laundry with me.

Has it happened again? Has Briggs done the same thing to me again and soon will send me packing? Where this time? Early retirement crosses my mind. It’s all coming out with more ugliness piled on, and that’s not survivable, I decide, because I don’t know what else to think. Briggs has told someone, and someone told Julia Gabriel, who has accused me of hatred, prejudice, callousness, dishonesty, and I must remember that this noxious miasma permeates any decisions I might make right now, that and fatigue.
Be exceedingly careful. Use your head. Don’t give yourself up to emotions, and
easy as pie
drifts through my mind. What Lucy said about security recordings, and I pick up my phone and buzz Bryce.

“Yes, boss,” he says brightly, as if we haven’t chatted in days.

“Our security recordings from the closed-circuit cameras everywhere,” I say. “When was Captain Avallone here from Dover? I understand Jack gave her a tour.”

“Oh, Lord, that was a while ago. I believe November….”

“I recall she went home to Maine the week of Thanksgiving,” I tell him. “I know she was gone from Dover that week because I had to stay. We were shorthanded.”

“That sounds about right. I think she was here that Friday.”

“Were you with them on the grand tour?”

“I was not. I wasn’t invited. And Jack spent a lot of time with her in your office, just so you know. In there with the door shut. They ate lunch in there at your table.”

“This is what I need you to do,” I tell him. “Get hold of Lucy, text-message her or whatever you need to do, and let her know I want a review of every security recording that has Jack and Sophia on it, including anything in my office.”

“In your office?”

“How long has he been using it?”

“Well…”

“Bryce? How long?”

“Pretty much the entire time. He helps himself when he wants to impress people. I mean, he doesn’t use it for his casework very often, mostly when he’s being ceremonial….”

“Tell Lucy I want recordings of my office. She’ll know exactly what I mean. I want to see what Jack and the captain were talking about.”

“How delicious. I’ll get right on it.”

“I’m about to make an important call, so please don’t disturb me,” I then say. As I hang up, I realize Benton will be here soon.

But I resist the temptation to rush. Wise to slow down, to allow thoughts and perceptions to sort themselves out, to strive for clarity.
You’re tired. Exercise caution, and play it smart when you’re this tired.
There’s one way to do this right, and every other way is wrong. You won’t know the right way until it happens, and you won’t recognize it if you’re wound up and muddled. I reach for my coffee but change my mind about that, too. It won’t help at this point, will only make me jittery and upset my stomach more. Pulling another pair of examination gloves out of a box on the granite counter behind my desk, I remove the document from the plastic bag I sealed it in.

I slide the two folded sheets of heavy paper out of the envelope I slit open in Benton’s SUV as we drove through a blizzard what now seems like a lifetime ago but hasn’t even been twelve hours. In the light of morning and after so much has happened, it seems more unusual than it did that this classical pianist who Bryce described as intelligent and reasonable would have used duct tape on her fine engraved stationery. Why not regular tape that is transparent instead of this ugly wide strip of lead-gray across the back? Why not do what I do when I enclose a private memo in an envelope and simply sign your name or initials over the seal of the flap? What was Erica Donahue afraid would happen? That her driver might want to read what she wrote to someone named Scarpetta who he apparently had never heard of?

I smooth open the pages with my cotton-gloved hand and try to intuit what the mother of a college boy who has confessed to murder transferred to the keys of her typewriter, as if what she felt and believed as she composed her plea to me is a chemical I can absorb that will get me into her mind. It occurs to me I’ve come up with such an analogy because of the plastic film I found in the pocket of Fielding’s lab coat. Hours beyond that unnerving druggy experience, I can see just how bad it really was and that I could not have been myself with Benton, and how uncomfortable it must have been for him. Maybe that’s why he’s being so secretive and is lecturing me about divulging information to whoever happens to be nearby, as if I, of all people, don’t know better. Maybe he doesn’t trust my judgment or self-control and fears that the horrors of war changed me. Maybe he’s not so sure that the woman who came home to him from Dover is the one he knows.

I’m not who you used to know
floats through my head.
I’m not sure you ever knew me
is a whisper in my thoughts, and as I read the neat rows of single-spaced type, I find it remarkable that in two pages there isn’t one mistake. I see no evidence of white-out or correction tape, no misspellings or bad grammar. When I think back to the last typewriter I used, a dusky pink IBM Selectric I had in Richmond the first few years I was there, I remember my chronic aggravation with ribbons that broke or having to swap out the golf ball-like element when I wanted to change fonts, and dealing with a dirty platen that left smudges on paper, not to mention my own hurried fingers hitting the wrong keys, and while my spelling and grammar are good, I’m certainly not infallible.