Port Mortuary (2 page)

I open my mouth wide, rinsing out the taste of decomposing charred human flesh that is trapped in the back of my throat. The stench of what I worked on today rises on swells of steam deep into my sinuses, the molecules of putrid biology in the shower with me. I scrub under my nails with antibacterial soap I squirt from a bottle, the same stuff I use on dishes or to decon my boots at a scene, and brush my teeth, gums, and tongue with Listerine. I wash inside my nostrils as far up as I can reach, scouring every inch of my flesh, then I wash my hair, not once but twice, and the stench is still there. I can’t seem to get clean.

The name of the dead soldier I just took care of is Peter Gabriel, like the legendary rock star, only this Peter Gabriel was a private first class in the army and had been in the Badghis Province of Afghanistan not even a month when a roadside bomb improvised from plastic sewer pipe packed with PE-4 and capped with a copper plate punched through the armor of his Humvee, creating a molten firestorm inside it. PFC Gabriel took up most of my last day here at this huge high-tech place where the armed forces pathologists and scientists routinely get involved in cases most members of the public don’t associate with us: the assassination of JFK; the recent DNA identifications of the Romanov family and the crew members of the
H.L. Hunley
submarine that sank during the Civil War. We’re a noble but little-known organization with roots reaching back to 1862, to the Army Medical Museum, whose surgeons attended to the mortally wounded Abraham Lincoln and performed his autopsy, and I should say all this on CNN. Focus on the positive. Forget what Mrs. Gabriel said. I’m not a monster or a bigot.
You can’t blame the poor woman for being upset,
I tell myself. She just lost her only child. The Gabriels are black.
How would you feel, for God’s sake? Of course you’re not a racist.

I sense a presence again. Someone has entered the changing room, which I’ve managed to fog up like a steam shower. My heart is beating hard because of the heat.

“Dr. Scarpetta?” Captain Avallone sounds less tentative, as if she has news.

I turn off the water and step out of my stall, grabbing a towel to wrap up in. Captain Avallone is an indistinct presence hovering in haze near the sinks and motion-sensitive hand dryers. All I can make out is her dark hair and her khaki cargo pants and black polo shirt with its embroidered AFME gold-and-blue shield.

“Pete Marino…” she starts to say.

“I’ll call him in a minute.” I snatch another towel off a shelf.

“He’s here, ma’am.”

“What do you mean
‘here’
?” I almost expect him to materialize in the changing room like some prehistoric creature emerging from the mist.

“He’s waiting for you out back by the bays, ma’am,” she informs me. “He’ll take you to the Eagle’s Rest so you can get your things.” She says it as if I’m being picked up by the FBI, as if I’ve been arrested or fired. “My instructions are to take you to him and assist in any way needed.”

Captain Avallone’s first name is Sophia. She’s army, just out of her radiology residency, and is always so damn military-correct and obsequiously polite as she lingers and loiters. Right now is not the time. I carry my toiletry basket, padding over tile, and she’s right behind me.

“I’m not supposed to leave until tomorrow, and going anywhere with Marino wasn’t part of my travel plans,” I tell her.

“I can take care of your vehicle, ma’am. I understand you’re not driving….”

“Did you ask him what the hell this is about?” I grab my hairbrush and my deodorant out of my locker.

“I tried, ma’am,” she says. “But he wasn’t helpful.”

A C-5 Galaxy roars overhead, on final for 19. The wind as usual is out of the south.

One of many aeronautical principles I’ve learned from Lucy, who is a helicopter pilot among other things, is that runway numbers correspond to directions on a compass. Nineteen, for example, is 190 degrees, meaning the opposite end will be 01, oriented that way because of the Bernoulli effect and Newton’s laws of motion. It’s all about the speed air needs to flow over a wing, about taking off and landing into the wind, which in this part of Delaware blows in from the sea, from high pressure to low, from south to north. Day in and day out, transport planes bring the dead and take them away along a blacktop strip that runs like the River Styx behind Port Mortuary.

The shark-gray Galaxy is the length of a football field, so huge and heavy it seems scarcely to move in a pale sky of feathery clouds that pilots call mare’s tails. I would know what type of airlifter it is without looking, can recognize the high pitch of its scream and whistle. By now I know the sound of turbine engines producing a hundred and sixty thousand pounds of thrust, can identify a C-5 or a C-17 when it’s miles out, and I know helicopters and tilt rotors, too, can tell a Chinook from a Black Hawk or an Osprey. During nice weather when I have a few moments to spare, I sit on a bench outside my lodging and watch the flying machines of Dover as if they’re exotic creatures, such as manatees or elephants or prehistoric birds. I never tire of their lumbering drama and thundering noise, and the shadows they cast as they pass over.

Wheels touch down in puffs of smoke so close by I feel the rumble in my hollow organs as I walk across the receiving area with its four enormous bays, high privacy wall, and backup generators. I approach a blue van I’ve never seen before, and Pete Marino makes no move to greet me or open my door, and this bodes nothing one way or another. He doesn’t waste his energy on manners, not that being gracious or particularly nice has ever been a priority of his for as long as I can remember. It’s been more than twenty years since the time when we first met in Richmond, Virginia, at the morgue. Or maybe it was a homicide scene where I first was confronted with him. I really can’t recall.

I climb in and shut the door, stuffing a duffel bag between my boots, my hair still damp from the shower. He thinks I look like hell and is silently judging. I can always tell by his sidelong glances that survey me from head to toe, lingering in certain places that are none of his business. He doesn’t like it when I wear my AFME investigative garb, my khaki cargo pants, black polo shirt, and tactical jacket, and the few times he’s seen me in uniform I think I scared him.

“Where’d you steal the van?” I ask as he backs up.

“A loaner from Civil Air.” His answer at least tells me nothing has happened to Lucy.

The private terminal on the north end of the runway is used by nonmilitary personnel who are authorized to land on the air force base. My niece has flown Marino here, and it crosses my mind they’ve come as a surprise. They showed up unannounced to spare me from flying commercial in the morning, to escort me home at last. Wishful thinking. That can’t be it, and I look for answers in Marino’s rough-featured face, taking in his overall appearance rather much the way I do a patient at first glance. Running shoes, jeans, a fleece-lined Harley-Davidson leather coat he’s had forever, a Yankees baseball cap he wears at his own peril, considering he now lives in the Republic of the Red Sox, and his unfashionable wire-rim glasses.

I can’t tell if his head is shaved smooth of what little gray hair he has left, but he is clean and relatively neat, and he doesn’t have a whisky flush or a bloated beer gut. His eyes aren’t bloodshot. His hands are steady. I don’t smell cigarettes. He’s still on the wagon, more than one. Marino has many wagons he is wise to stay on, a train of them working their way through the unsettled territories of his aboriginal inclinations. Sex, booze, drugs, tobacco, food, profanity, bigotry, slothfulness. I probably should add mendacity. When it suits him, he’s evasive or outright lies.

“I assume Lucy’s with the helicopter…?” I start to say.

“You know how it is around this joint when you’re doing a case, worse than the damn CIA,” he talks over me as we turn onto Purple Heart Drive. “Your house could be on fire and nobody says shit, and I must have called five times. So I made an executive decision, and Lucy and me headed out.”

“It would be helpful if you’d tell me why you’re here.”

“Nobody would interrupt you while you were doing the soldier from Worcester,” he says to my amazement.

PFC Gabriel was from Worcester, Massachusetts, and I can’t fathom why Marino would know what case I had here at Dover. No one should have told him. Everything we do at Port Mortuary is extremely discreet, if not strictly classified. I wonder if the slain soldier’s mother did what she threatened and called the media. I wonder if she told the press that her son’s white female military medical examiner is a racist.

Before I can ask, Marino adds, “Apparently, he’s the first war casualty from Worcester, and the local media’s all over it. We’ve gotten some calls, I guess people getting confused and thinking any dead body with a Massachusetts connection ends up with us.”

“Reporters assumed we’d done the autopsy in Cambridge?”

“Well, the CFC’s a port mortuary, too. Maybe that’s why.”

“One would think the media certainly knows by now that all casualties in theater come straight here to Dover,” I reply. “You’re certain about the reason for the media’s interest?”

“Why?” He looks at me. “You know some other reason I don’t?”

“I’m just asking.”

“All I know is there were a few calls and we referred them to Dover. So you were in the middle of taking care of the kid from Worcester and nobody would get you on the phone, and finally I called General Briggs when we were about twenty minutes out, refueling in Wilmington. He made Captain Do-Bee go find you in the shower. She single, or does she sing in Lucy’s choir? Because she’s not bad-looking.”

“How would you know what she looks like?” I reply, baffled.

“You weren’t around when she stopped by the CFC on her way to visit her mother in Maine.”

I try to remember if I was ever told this, and at the same time I’m reminded I have no idea what has gone on in the office I’m supposed to run.

“Fielding gave her the royal tour, the host with the most.” Marino doesn’t like my deputy chief, Jack Fielding. “Point being, I did try to get hold of you. I didn’t mean to just show up like this.”

Marino is being evasive, and what he’s described is a ploy. It’s made up. For some reason he felt it necessary to simply appear here without warning. Probably because he wanted to make sure I would go with him without delay. I sense real trouble.

“The Gabriel case can’t be why you just showed up, as you put it,” I say.

“Afraid not.”

“What’s happened?”

“We’ve got a situation.” He stares straight ahead. “And I told Fielding and everybody else that no way in hell the body was being examined until you get there.”

Jack Fielding is an experienced forensic pathologist who doesn’t take orders from Marino. If my deputy chief opted to be hands-off and defer to me, it likely means we’ve got a case that could have political implications or get us sued. It bothers me considerably that Fielding hasn’t tried to call or e-mail me. I check my iPhone again. Nothing from him.

“About three-thirty yesterday afternoon in Cambridge,” Marino is saying, and we’re on Atlantic Street now, driving slowly through the middle of the base in the near dark. “Norton’s Woods on Irving, not even a block from your house. Too damn bad you weren’t home. You could have gone to the scene, could have walked there, and maybe things would have turned out different.”

“What things?”

“A light-skinned male, possibly in his twenties. Appears he was out walking his dog and dropped dead from a heart attack, right? Wrong,” he continues as we pass rows of concrete and metal maintenance facilities, hangars and other buildings that have numbers instead of names. “It’s broad daylight on a Sunday afternoon, plenty of people around because there was an event at whatever that building is, the one with the big green metal roof.”

Norton’s Woods is the home of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a wooded estate with a stunning building of timber and glass that is rented out for special functions. It is several houses down from the one Benton and I moved into last spring so I could be near the CFC and he could enjoy the close proximity of Harvard, where he is on the faculty of the medical school’s Department of Psychiatry.

“In other words, eyes and ears,” Marino goes on. “A hell of a time and a place to whack somebody.”

“I thought you said he was a heart attack. Except if he’s that young, you probably mean a cardiac arrhythmia.”

“Yeah, that was the assumption. A couple of witnesses saw him suddenly grab his chest and collapse. He was DOA at the scene—supposedly. Was transported directly to our office and spent the night in the cooler.”

“What do you mean
‘supposedly’
?”

“Early this morning Fielding went into the fridge and noticed blood drips on the floor and a lot of blood in the tray, so he goes and gets Anne and Ollie. The dead guy’s got blood coming out of his nose and mouth that wasn’t there the afternoon before, when he was pronounced. No blood at the scene, not one drop, and now he’s bleeding, and it’s not purge fluid, obviously, because he sure as hell isn’t decomposing. The sheet he’s covered with is bloody, and there’s about a liter of blood in the body pouch, and that’s fucked up. I’ve never seen a dead person start bleeding like that. So I said we got a fucking problem and everybody keep your mouth shut.”

“What did Jack say? What did he do?”

“You’re kidding, right? Some deputy you got. Don’t get me started.”