Port Mortuary (47 page)

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?”

“The nanobot. Or it looks broken, or maybe it’s deteriorating, like it was supposed to have eight legs but I’m seeing four on one side and two on the other. I’m e-mailing this to you now, a couple photographs we took so you can see it for yourself.”

I’m able to pull up the images on my iPhone, and it is an inexplicable feeling to note the eerie symmetry, to have it enter my mind that the nanobot looks like a molecular version of a micro-mechanical fly. I can’t know if Lucy’s holy grail of flybots looks like this nanobot magnified thousands of times, but the artificial structure in the photographs is insectlike with its grayish bucky-ball elongated body. The delicate nanowire arms or legs that are still intact are bent at right angles with gripperlike appendages on the tips, possibly for grabbing onto the walls of cells or burrowing into blood vessels or organs, to find the target, in other words, and adhere to it while delivering medicine or perhaps illegal drugs destined for certain brain receptors.

No wonder Johnny Donahue’s drug screen was negative, it occurs to me. If nanobots were added to his sublingual allergy exacts or, better yet, to his corticosteroid nasal spray, the drugs might have been below the level of detection. More astonishingly, the drugs may not have penetrated the blood-brain barrier at all, but would have been programmed to bind to receptors in the frontal cortex. If the drugs never entered the bloodstream, they wouldn’t have been excreted in urine. They wouldn’t have ended up in hair, and that’s the point of nanotechnology’s use in medicine, to treat diseases and disorders with drugs that aren’t systemic and therefore are less harmful. As is true with everything else, whatever can be used for good most assuredly will be used for evil.

Fielding’s living room is bare floors and walls, and stacked almost to the ceiling are dusty brown boxes, all the same size, with the moving company Gentle Giant’s logo on the sides, scores of cartons in cubed piles as if they’ve never been touched since they were carried in here.

In the midst of this cardboard bunker Briggs sits, reminding me of a Matthew Brady photograph of a Civil War general, in his muted sandy-green fatigues and boots, a Mac notebook in his lap, his broad-shouldered back straight against the straight-back chair. I decide it would be like him to sit and make me stand, to choreograph our conversation so I feel small and subservient to him, but he gets up, and I tell him no, thank you. I’ll stand. So both of us do, moving to a window, where he places his laptop on a sill.

“I find it interesting he has a wireless network in here,” Briggs says right off, looking out at the view of the ocean and the rocks across the icy street that is covered with tan sand. “With all you’ve seen in here, would you expect him to have wireless?”

“Maybe he wasn’t the only person in here.”

“Maybe.”

“At least you’ll entertain the possibility. That’s more than anybody else seems to be doing.” I place my iPhone on the window-sill so he can see what is in the small display, and he looks at it, and then he looks away.

“Imagine two types of nanobots,” he says, as if he’s talking to someone on the other side of the wavy old window, as if his attention is out there in the sunlight and sparkling water and not with the woman standing next to him, a woman who always feels young and insecure with him, no matter her age or who she grew up to become.

“A nanobot that is biodegradable,” he says, “that vanishes at some point after delivering a minute dose of a psychoactive drug, and then a second type of nanobot that self-replicates.”

I always feel like someone else with Briggs, someone other than myself, and as I stand next to him, our sleeves touching and feeling his heat, I think of the wonderful and the terrible ways he has shaped me.

“The self-replicating one is what worries us most. Imagine if you got something like that inside you,” he says, and what’s inside me is the irresistible force that is General John Briggs, and I understand what Fielding felt and how much he must have revered and resented me.

I understand how awful and wonderful it is to be overwhelmed by someone. Like a drug, it occurs to me. An addiction you desperately want to get over and desperately want to keep. Briggs will always have the same effect on me, I think. I won’t get over it in this life.

“And the self-replicating nanobot enables the sustained release of something like testosterone,” Briggs says, and I feel his energy, the intensity of him, and I’m aware of how close we are standing to each other, drawn to each other, just as we’ve always been and should never have been. “A drug like PCP couldn’t replicate, of course, so that would be a dead-end hit, would be repeated only as the subject repeats his or her nasal spray or injections or applies a new transdermal patch impregnated with biodegradable nanobots. But something your body naturally produces could be programmed to replicate, so the nanobot is replicating, flowing freely through the body, through your arteries, latching onto target areas, like the frontal cortex of your brain, without the need of a battery. Self-propelled and replicating.”

Briggs looks at me, and his eyes are hard but there is something in them that he’s always held for me, an attachment that is as constant as it is conflicted. I’m vividly reminded of who we were at Walter Reed, when our futures held mystery and limitless possibility, when he was older and profoundly formidable to me and I was a prodigy. He called me Major Prodigy, and then I returned from South Africa and went to Richmond and he didn’t call me at all, not for years. What we had with each other was complex and unfathomable, and I’m reminded all over again when I’m with him.

“We wouldn’t need wars anymore,” he says. “Not the sort of wars you and I know, Kay. We’re on the threshold of a new world where our old wars will seem easy and humane.”

“Jack Fielding wasn’t that kind of scientist,” I reply. “He didn’t manufacture those patches and probably would have been extremely resistant and unnerved, had someone attempted to entice him into using drugs delivered by nanobots. I would be stunned if he even knew what a nanobot is or would have a clue this was what he was letting loose in his system. He probably thought he was taking some new form of steroid, a designer steroid, something that would help him in his bodybuilding, help alleviate his chronic pain from decades of overuse, help him fight aging. He hated getting older. Getting old wasn’t an option to him.”