Port Mortuary (34 page)

“Kay?”

“Or grizzly bears, for example, while you’re minding your own business on a friendly hike through the mountains.” I make no effort to keep the sarcasm out of my tone, to hide the anger I feel. “And, of course, military, but nothing I’ve seen in military casualties—”

“I’m on a cell phone,” Benton interrupts me. “I’d rather you don’t mention this to anyone else. No one in your office, or have you already?”

“I haven’t already.”

“You’re by yourself?” he asks me again.

Why wouldn’t I be?
But I say, “Yes.”

“And maybe you could delete it from your history, empty your cache, in case anybody decides to view your recent searches.”

“I can’t stop Lucy from doing that.”

“I don’t care if Lucy does it.”

“She’s not here. I don’t know where she went.”

“I know,” he says.

“All right, then.” He’s not going to tell me where she is or where anybody is, it seems. “I’ll make evidence rounds, take care of as much as I can and meet you downstairs in back when you get here.” I hang up and try to reason through what just happened. I try not to feel hurt by him as I logically sort it out.

Benton didn’t sound surprised or especially concerned. He didn’t seem alarmed by what I’ve discovered but by my discovering it and the possibility that I might have told someone else, and that probably means the same thing I’ve been sensing since I returned home from Dover. Maybe I’m not the one finding things out. Maybe I’m simply the last one to know and nobody wants me to find out anything. What an unexpected predicament to be in, if not an unprecedented one, I think, as I do what Benton asked and empty the cache and clear the history, making it problematic for anyone to see what I’ve been searching on the Internet. As I do this I wonder who really asked: My husband, or was it the FBI asking? Who was just talking to me and telling me what to do as if I don’t know better?

It’s almost nine, and most of my staff is already here, those who aren’t using the snow as an excuse to stay home or to go somewhere else they’d rather be, such as skiing in Vermont. On the security monitor I’ve watched cars pull into the lot and seen some people coming through the back door but far more arriving by way of the civilized entrance on the ground floor, through the stone lobby with its formidable carvings and flags, avoiding the dreary domain of the dead on the lower level. The scientists rarely need to meet the patients whose body fluids and belongings and other evidence they test, and then I hear the sounds of my administrator, Bryce, unlocking the door in the hallway that opens onto his adjoining office.

I reseal the blotting paper in a clean envelope and unlock a drawer to gather other items I’ve been keeping safe as I try not to sink into a dark space, thinking dark thoughts about what I just looked at on a website and what it implies about human beings and their capacity to create imaginative ways to do harm to other creatures. In the name of survival, it crosses my mind, but then rarely is it really about staying alive; instead, it’s about making sure something else doesn’t, and the power people feel when they can overpower, maim, kill. How terrible, how awful, and I have no doubt about what happened to the man from Norton’s Woods, that someone came up behind him and stabbed him with an injection knife, blasting a ball of compressed gas into his vital organs, and if it was CO
₂
, there is no test that will tell us. Carbon dioxide is ubiquitous, literally as present as the air we exhale, and I envision what I saw on CT, the dark pockets of air that had been blown into the chest and what that must have felt like and how I will answer the same question I’m always asked.

Did he suffer?

The truthful answer would be no one knows such a thing except the person who is dead, but I would say no, he didn’t suffer. I would say he felt it. He felt something catastrophic happening to him. He wasn’t conscious long enough to suffer during the agonal last moments of his life, but he would have felt a punch to his lower back accompanied by tremendous pressure in his chest as his organs ruptured, all of it happening at once. That would have been the last thing he felt except possibly a glimmer, a flash, of a panicked thought that he was about to die, and then I stop thinking about it because to obsess and imagine further would become useless and self-indulgent theorizing that is paralyzing and nonproductive. I can’t help him if I’m upset.

I’m worthless to anyone if I feel what I feel, just as it was when I took care of my father and became an expert at pushing down emotions that climbed up inside me like some desperate creature trying to get out. “I worry what you have learned, my little Katie,” my father said to me when I was twelve and he was a skeleton in the back bedroom, where the air was always too warm and smelled like sickness and light seeped wanly through the slatted shades I kept closed most of the way his last months. “You have learned things you shouldn’t ever have to learn but especially at your age, my little Katie,” he said to me as I made the bed with him still in it, having learned to wash him religiously so he wasn’t overcome by pressure sores, to change his soiled sheets by moving his body, a body that seemed hollowed out and dead except for the heat of his fever.

I would gently rock my father to his side, holding him up on one side, then the other, leaning him against me because he could not get up in the end, couldn’t even sit up. He was too weak to help me move him during what his doctor called the blast phase of chronic myeloid leukemia, and at times he enters my mind and I feel the weight of him against me when I’m swathed in protective clothing, peering through protective glasses, at work at my hard steel table.

I fill out lab analysis requests that will need to be signed by each scientist I receipt various items to so I can keep the chain of evidence intact. Then I get up from my desk.

K
nocking once, I open the door that leads into Bryce’s office.

Our shared entrance is directly across from the door to my private bath, which I’ve learned to keep open a crack. When both metal gray doors are shut I have had a tendency to get mixed up and walk in on Bryce when I’m interested in coffee or washing up or I find myself about to hand paperwork to a toilet and a sink. He is at his desk with his chair rolled back and has taken off his coat, which is draped over the back, but he still has on his big designer sunglasses that look ridiculously heavy, as if drawn on with a dark-brown crayon. He struggles with a pair of L.L.Bean snow boots that don’t go with his typically deliberate ensemble, which today is a navy cashmere blazer, tight black jeans, a black turtleneck, and a tooled leather belt with a big silver buckle shaped like a dragon.

“I’ll be on the phone and can’t be disturbed,” I tell him as if I’ve been here every day for these past six months, as if I’ve never been gone. “Then I have to leave.”

“Is someone going to tell me what’s going on around here? And welcome home, boss.” He looks up at me, his eyes masked by the big, dark glasses. “I don’t suppose the unmarked cars in the parking lot are a surprise party, because I know I’m not throwing one. Not that I wouldn’t and wasn’t intending to eventually, but whoever they are, they aren’t here because of me, and when I asked one of them to be so kind as to give me an explanation and please move his ass so I could park in my spot, he was shall we say
testy
?”

“The case from yesterday morning,” I start to say.

“Oh, is that why? Well, no wonder.” His face brightens as if what I just said is somehow good news. “I knew it was going to be important, I somehow knew it. But he didn’t really die here, please tell me it’s not true, that you didn’t find anything to suggest anything so outrageous or I guess I’ll just start looking for another job right this minute and tell Ethan we’re not about to buy that bungalow we’ve been looking at. I’m sure you’ve figured out what happened by now, knowing you. You probably figured it out in five minutes.”

He pulls off the other boot, moving both of them to the side, and I notice he’s spiked his hair and has shaved off the mustache and beard he had when I saw him last. Compactly built, Bryce is slight but strong with a blond choirboy prettiness, to use a cliche, because it happens to be true. He doesn’t look like himself with facial hair, which is probably the point, to look like someone else, to be transformed into a formidable and virile character like James Brolin, or to be taken seriously like Wolf Blitzer, heroes of his. My top administrator and trusted right hand has many, a host of famous imagined friends he speaks of easily as if the act of tuning them into one of his big-screen TVs or saving them with TiVo makes them as real as next-door neighbors.

Seriously good at what he does for me, with degrees in criminal justice and public administration, Bryce Clark at a glance seems misplaced, as if he wandered off the set of E!, and I have used this to my advantage over the few years he’s worked for me. Outsiders and even people who work here don’t always realize that my recovering Mormon compulsive-talking clotheshorse of a chief of staff is not to be trifled with. If nothing else, he’s voyeuristic and adores “filling me in,” as he puts it. He likes nothing better than to gather information like a magpie and carry it back to his nest. He is dangerous if he detests you. It’s unlikely you’ll know it. His banter and deliberate affect are a bunker that his more dangerous self hides behind, and in that way he reminds me of my former secretary, Rose. Those who made the mistake of treating her like a silly old woman one day found themselves missing a limb.

“The FBI? Homeland Security? No one I’ve seen before.” Bryce is bent over in his chair as he unzips a nylon gym bag, his stocking feet planted on the floor.

“Probably the FBI—” But he isn’t going to let me finish.

“Well, the one who was so rude totally looked the part, all buff in a gray suit and camel-hair coat. I think the FBI fires people if they get fat. Well, good luck hiring in America. Drop-dead good-looking, I’ll give him that. Did you see him back there? Do we know his name and what field office he’s with? Not anyone I’ve met from Boston. Maybe he’s new.”

“Who?” My thoughts run into a wall.

“Lord, you are tired. The agent in that big, bad black Ford Expedition, the spitting image of the football player on
Glee
—oh, you probably don’t watch that, either, it’s only the best show on TV and I can’t imagine you don’t love Jane Lynch, unless you don’t know who she is, since you probably didn’t catch
The L Word,
but maybe
Best in Show
or
Talladega Nights
? My God, what a hoot. The Bureau boy in the black Ford looks exactly like Finn—”

“Bryce…”

“Anyway, I saw all the blood, how much the body from Norton’s Woods bled inside his pouch, and it was god-awful, and I thought to myself,
This is it. The end of this place.
Meanwhile, Marino’s huffing and puffing and about to blow the house down, pitching a fit as only Marino can about someone delivered alive and dying in the fridge. So I told Ethan we might have to tuck away our pennies because I might be unemployed. And the job market right now? Ten percent unemployment or some nightmare like that, and I seriously doubt
Doctor G
is going to hire me because every morgue worker on the planet wants to be on her show, but I would ask you to pick up the phone and recommend me to her, please, if this place goes down the toilet. Why can’t we do a reality show? I mean, really. You had your own show on CNN some years ago; why can’t we do something here?”

“I need to talk to you about—” But there’s no point when he gets like this.

“I’m glad you’re here, but sorry you had to come home for something so god-awful. I stayed awake all night wondering what I’m going to tell reporters. When I saw those SUVs behind the building, I thought it was the media, was fully expecting television trucks—”

“Bryce, you need to calm down and maybe take your sunglasses off—”

“But nothing in the news that I know of, and not one reporter has called me or left a message here or anything—”

“I need to go over a few things, and you really need to shut up, please,” I interrupt him.

“I know.” He takes off his sunglasses as he works his foot into a black high-top sneaker. “I’m just a little overwrought, Dr. Scarpetta. And you know how I get when I’m overwrought.”

“Have you heard from Jack?”

“Where’s the Mouth of Truth when you need it?” As he ties his sneakers. “Don’t ask me to pretend, and I would respectfully request that you inform him I don’t answer directly to him anymore. Now that you’re home, thank God.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because all he does is order me around as if I work in the drive-through window at Wendy’s. He barks and snaps as his hair falls out, and then I wonder if he’s going to kick someone, maybe me, or strangle me with his umpteen-degree black belt or whatever the fuck he has, excuse my French. And it’s gotten worse, and we weren’t supposed to bother you at Dover. I told everybody to leave you alone. Everybody’s told everybody to leave you alone or they’ll answer to me. I’m just realizing you’ve been up all night. You look awful.” His blue eyes look me up and down, studying the way I’m dressed, which is in the same khaki cargo pants and black polo shirt with the AFME crest that I put on at Dover.

“I came straight here and don’t have anything to change into.” I finally get a word in edgewise. “I don’t know why you bothered replacing your L.L.Beans with an old pair of Converse left over from basketball camp.”

“I know you have a better eye than that, and I know you know I never went to basketball camp, because I always went to music camp every summer. Hugo Boss, half-price at Endless-dot-com, plus free shipping,” he adds, getting up from his chair. “I’m making coffee, and you want some. And no, I’ve not heard from Jack, and you don’t need to tell me there’s a problem and it might have to do with those agents in our parking lot, who obviously have a personality disorder. I don’t know why they can’t make an effort to be friendly. If I wore a big gun and could arrest people, I’d be Little Miss Sunshine to everyone, smile and be so nice. Why not?” Bryce brushes past me, walking into my office, disappearing into the bathroom. “I can run by your house and pick up a few things if you want. Just tell me. A business suit or something casual?”