Port Mortuary (26 page)

All three of them dead now.

Did Fielding discuss the Patten case with Mrs. Gabriel, and who did she talk to first, Fielding or me? She called me at Dover at around quarter of eight. I always fill out a call sheet, and I remember writing down the time as I sat in my small office at Dover’s Port Mortuary, looking at the CT scans and their coordinates that would help me locate with GPS precision the frag and other objects that had penetrated the badly burned body of her son. Based on what she said to me as I now try to reconstruct that conversation, she likely talked to Fielding first. That might explain her repeated references to “other cases.”

Someone had planted an idea in her head about what we do for other cases. She was under the distinct impression that we routinely extract semen from casualties and in fact encourage it, and I recall being puzzled, because the procedure has to be approved and is fraught with legal complications. I couldn’t imagine what had given her such an idea, and I might have asked her about it, had she not been so busy castigating me and calling me names. What kind of monster would prevent a woman from having her dead boyfriend’s children or stop the mother of a dead son from being a grandmother? We do it for our other cases, why not her son? she wept.
“I have no one left,”
she cried.
“This is bullshit bureaucracy, go on and admit it,”
she yelled at me.
“Bureaucratic bullshit to cover up yet another hate crime.”

“Anyone home?” Benton is in the doorway.

Mrs. Gabriel called me a military bigot.
“You do unto others as long as they’re white,”
she said.
“That’s not the Golden Rule but the White Rule,”
she said.
“You took care of that other boy who got killed in Boston, and he wasn’t even a US soldier, but not my son, who died for his country. I suppose my son was the wrong color,”
she went on, and I had no idea what she meant or what she was basing such an accusation on. I didn’t try to figure it out because it seemed like hysteria, nothing more, and I forgave her for it on the spot. Even though it obviously hurt me badly and I’ve not been able to put it out of my mind since.

“Hello?” Benton is walking in.

“Another hate crime, only it will be found out and people like you won’t get rewarded this time,”
and she wouldn’t explain what she was thinking when she said something so terrible as that. But I didn’t ask her to elaborate, and I didn’t give her venomous comments much credence at the time, because being yelled at, cursed, threatened, and even attacked by people who are otherwise civilized and sane isn’t a new experience. I don’t have shatterproof glass installed in the lobbies and viewing rooms of offices where I’ve worked because I’m afraid of the dead throwing a fit or assaulting me.

“Kay?”

My eyes focus on Benton holding two coffees and trying not to spill them. Why would Julia Gabriel have called here before calling me at Dover? Or did Fielding call her, and in either event, why would he have talked to her? Then I remember Marino telling me about PFC Gabriel being the first casualty from Worcester and the media calling the CFC as if the body was here instead of at Dover, about a number of phone calls here because of the Massachusetts connection. Maybe that’s how Fielding found out, but why would he get on the phone with the slain soldier’s mother, even if she called here by mistake and needed to be reminded her son was at Dover? Of course she knew that. How could Mrs. Gabriel not know her son was flown into Dover? I can’t see any legitimate reason for Fielding to have talked to her or what he possibly could have said that was helpful, and how dare him.

He’s not military or even a consultant for the AFME. He’s a civilian and has no right to probe into details relating to war casualties or national security or to engage in conversations about such matters, which are plainly defined as classified. Military and medical intelligence are none of his business. RUSI is none of his business. The election in the UK isn’t, either. The only thing that should be Fielding’s damn business is what he has so resoundingly neglected, which is his enormous responsibility here at the CFC and what should be his damn loyalty to me.

“That’s nice of you,” I say to Benton in a detached way. “I could use a coffee.”

“Where were you just now? Besides in the middle of an imagined fight. You look like you might kill someone.”

He comes close to the desk, watching me the way he does when he’s trying to read what I’m thinking because he’s not about to trust what I say. Or maybe he knows what I have to say is only the beginning of things and that I’m clueless about the rest of it.

“You okay?” He sets the coffees on the desk and moves a chair close.

“No, I’m not okay.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I think I just discovered what it means when something reaches critical mass.”

“What’s the matter?” he asks.

“Everything.”

P
lease shut the door.” It occurs to me I’m starting to act like Lucy. “I don’t know where to begin, so many things are the matter.”

Benton closes the door, and I notice the simple platinum band on his left ring finger. Sometimes I’m still caught by surprise that we’re married, so much of our lives consumed by each other whether we’ve been together or apart, and we always agreed we didn’t have to do it, to be official and formal, because we’re not like other people, and then we did it anyway. The ceremony was a small, simple one, not a celebration as much as a swearing in, because we really meant it when we said until death do us part. After all we’d been through, for us to say it was more than words, more like an oath of office or an ordination or perhaps a summary of what we’d already lived. And I wonder if he ever regrets it. For example, right now does he wish he could go back to how it was? I wouldn’t blame him if he thinks about what he’s given up and what he misses, and there are so many complications because of me.

He sold his family brownstone, an elegant nineteenth-century mansion on the Boston Common, and he can’t have loved some places we’ve lived or stayed in because of my unusual profession and preoccupations, what is a chaotic and costly existence despite my best intentions. While his forensic psychology practice has remained stable, my career has been in flux these past three years, with the shutting down of a private practice in Charleston, South Carolina, then my office in Watertown closing because of the economy, and I was in New York and then Washington and Dover, and now this, the CFC.

“What the hell is going on in this place?” I ask him as if he knows and I don’t understand why he would. But I feel he does, or maybe I’m just wishing it because I’m beginning to experience desperation, that panicky sensation of falling and flailing for something to grab hold of.

“Black and extra-bold.” He sits back down and slides the mug of coffee closer. “And not hazelnut. Even though you have quite a stash of it, I hear.”

“Jack’s still not shown up, and no one has heard from him, I assume.”

“He’s definitely not here. I think you’re as safe in his office as he’s been in yours.” Benton says it as if he means more than one thing, and I notice how he’s dressed.

Earlier he had on his winter coat and in the x-ray room was covered in a disposable gown before heading upstairs to Lucy’s lab. I didn’t really notice what he was wearing underneath his layers. Black tactical boots, black tactical pants, a dark red flannel shirt, a rubber waterproof watch with a luminescent dial. As if he’s anticipating being out in the weather or some place that might be hard on his clothes.

“So Lucy told you it appears he’s been using my office,” I say. “For what purpose I don’t know. But maybe you do.”

“Nobody’s needed to tell me there’s a looting mentality at what is it Marino calls this place? CENTCOM? Or does that just refer to the inner sanctum or what’s supposed to be the inner sanctum, your office. No captain of the ship, and you know what happens. The Jolly Roger flag goes up, the inmates run the asylum, the drunks manage the bar, if you’ll excuse me for mixing metaphors.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“I don’t work at the CFC. Or for it. Just an invited guest on occasion,” he says.

“That’s not an answer, and you know it. Why wouldn’t you protect me?”

“You mean in the manner you think I should,” he says, because it’s silly to suggest he wouldn’t protect me.

“What has been going on around here? Maybe if you tell me, I can figure out what needs to be done,” I then say. “I know Lucy’s been catching you up. It would be nice if someone would catch me up. In detail, and with openness and full disclosure.”

“I’m sorry you’re angry. I’m sorry you’ve come home to a situation that is upsetting. Your homecoming should have been joyful.”

“Joyful. What the hell is joyful?”

“A word, a theoretical concept. Like full disclosure. I can tell you what I’ve witnessed firsthand, what happened when I met here several times. Case discussions. There have been two that involved me.” He stares off. “The first was the BC football player from last fall, not long after the CFC took over the Commonwealth’s forensic cases.”

Wally Jamison, age twenty, Boston College’s star quarterback. Found floating in the Boston Harbor on November 1 at dawn. Cause of death exsanguination due to blunt-force trauma and multiple cutting injuries. Tom Booker’s case, one of my other MEs.

“Jack didn’t do that one,” I remind him.

“Well, if you ask him, you might get a different impression,” Benton informs me. “Jack reviewed the Wally Jamison case as if it was his. Dr. Booker wasn’t present. This was last week.”

“Why last week? I don’t know anything about it.”

“New information, and we wanted to talk to Jack, and he seemed eager to cooperate, to offer a wealth of information.”

“‘We’?”

Benton lifts his coffee, then changes his mind and sets it back down on Fielding’s sloppy desk with all its collectibles that are all about him. “I think Jack’s attitude is he may not have done the autopsy, but that’s just a technicality. An NFL draft was right up the alley of your ironman freak of a deputy chief.”

“‘Ironman freak’?”

“But I suppose it was his bad luck to be out of town when Wally Jamison got beaten and hacked to death. Wally’s luck was a little worse.”

Believed to have been abducted and murdered on Halloween. Crime scene unknown. No suspect. No motive or credible theory. Just the speculation of a satanic cult initiation. Target a star athlete. Hold him hostage in some clandestine place and kill him savagely. Chatter on the Internet and on the news. Gossip that’s become gospel.

“I don’t give a shit what Jack’s feeling is or what’s right up his goddamn alley,” says a hard part of me that’s old and scarred over, a part of me that is completely fed up with Jack Fielding.

I realize I’m enraged by him. I’m suddenly aware that at the core of my unhealthy relationship with him is molten fury.

“And Mark Bishop, also last week. Wednesday was the football player. Thursday was the boy,” Benton says.

“A boy whose murder might be related to some initiation. A gang, a cult,” I interject. “A similar speculation about Wally Jamison.”

“
Speculation
being the operative word. Whose speculation?”

“Not mine.” I think angrily of Fielding. “I don’t speculate unless it’s behind closed doors with someone I trust. I know better than to put something out there, and then the police run with it, then the media runs with it. Next thing I know, a jury believes it, too.”

“Patterns and parallels.”

“You’re connecting Mark Bishop and Wally Jamison.” It seems incredible. “I fail to see what they might have in common besides speculation.”

“I was here last week for both case consults.” Benton’s eyes are steady on me. “Where was Jack last Halloween? Do you know for a fact?”

“I know where I was, that’s about the only fact I know. While I’ve been at Dover, that’s all I’ve known and all I was supposed to know. I didn’t hire him so I could goddamn babysit him. I don’t know where the hell he was on Halloween. I guess you’re going to tell me he wasn’t out somewhere taking his kids trick-or-treating.”

“He was in Salem. But not with his kids.”

“I wouldn’t know that and don’t know why you do or why it’s important.”

“It wasn’t important until very recently,” Benton says.

I stare at his boots again, then at his dark pants with their flannel lining and cargo and rear slash pockets for gun magazines and flashlights, the type of pants he wears when he’s working in the field, when he goes to crime scenes or is out on the firing or explosive-ordnance-disposal ranges with cops, with the FBI.

“Where were you before you picked me up at Hanscom?” I ask him. “What were you doing?”

“We have a lot to deal with, Kay. I’m afraid more than I thought.”

“Were you dressed in field clothes when you picked me up at the airport?” It occurs to me that he might not have been. He’s changed his clothes. Maybe he hasn’t done anything yet but is about to.

“I keep a bag in my car. As you know,” Benton says. “Since I never know when I might get called.”

“To go where? You’ve been called to go somewhere?”

He looks at me, then out the window at the chalky skyline of Boston in the snowy dark.

“Lucy says you’ve been on the phone.” I continue to prod him for information I can tell I’m not going to get right now.