Port Mortuary (2010) ks-18 Read online

  That would be like him. To vanish without warning, then show up just as unexpectedly and catch me red-handed, sitting at his desk, going through his electronic files. It’s just one more thing he’ll use against me, and he’s used plenty against me over the years. What has he been doing behind my back? Let’s see what else I find, and then I’ll know what to do. I look at the time stamp again and imagine Fielding sitting in this very chair at eight-oh-three this morning, printing the speech while Lucy, Marino, Anne, and Ollie, while everybody, was in an uproar because of what was in the cooler downstairs.

  How odd that Fielding would be up here in his office while that was going on, and I wonder if he even cared that a man might have been locked inside our refrigerator while still alive. Of course, Fielding would have to care. How could he not? If the worst had turned out to be true, he would be blamed. Ultimately, I would be the one all over the news and likely out of a job, but he would go down with me. Yet he was up here on the seventh floor, in his office and out of the fray, as if he already had his mind made up, and it occurs to me that his disappearance may be related to something else. I lean back in his chair and look around, my attention landing on the pad of call sheets and a ballpoint pen near his phone. I notice faint indentations on the top sheet of paper.

  Turning on a lamp, I pick up the pad and hold it at various angles, trying to make out indented writing left like a footprint when someone wrote a note on a top sheet of paper that is no longer there. One thing about Fielding, he doesn’t have a light touch, not when he’s wielding a scalpel or typing on a keyboard or writing something by hand. For a devotee of martial arts, he is surprisingly rough, is easily frustrated and quick to flare up. He has a childish way of holding a pencil or pen with two fingers on top instead of one, as if he’s using chopsticks, and it’s not uncommon for him to break lead or nibs, and he’s hell on Magic Markers.

  I don’t need ESDA or a Docustat or vacuum box or some other indented writing-recovery unit to detect what I can see the old-fashioned way in oblique lighting with my own eyes. Fielding’s barely legible scribble. What appears to be two separate notes. One is a phone number with a 508 area code and “MVF8/18/UK Min of Def Diary2/8.” Then a second one: “U of Sheffield today @ Whitehall. Over and out.” I look again, making sure I read the last three words correctly. Over and out. The end of a radio transmission, like Roger Wilco over and out but also a song performed by a heavy-metal band that Fielding used to play in his car all the time when he first came to Richmond. “Over and out / every dog has its day.” What he’d sing to me when he’d threaten to quit, when he’d had enough or when he was teasing, flirting, pretending to be fed up. Did he write over and out on a call sheet with me in mind or for some other reason?

  I find a legal pad in a drawer and write what I’ve discovered indented on the pad of call sheets and begin doing the best I can to figure out what Fielding was up to and thinking about what it is he wants me to know. If I came in here to snoop, I was going to find the printout and the indented writing. He knows me. He would think that way, because he knows damn well how my mind works. The University of Sheffield is one of the top research institutions in the world, and Whitehall is where RUSI is headquartered, literally in the former Whitehall Palace, the original location of Scotland Yard.

  Logging on to Intelliquest, a search engine Lucy created for the CFC, I type in RUSI and the date February 8 and Whitehall. What comes up is the title of a keynote address, Civilian-Military Collaboration, the lecture Fielding must be referring to that was delivered at RUSI at ten a.m. UK time, what is now yesterday morning for me. The speaker was Dr. Liam Saltz, the controversial Nobel laureate whose doomsday opinions about military technology make him a natural enemy of DARPA. I wasn’t aware he was on the faculty at the University of Sheffield. I thought he was at Berkeley. He used to be at Berkeley, and now he’s at Sheffield, I read on the Internet as I think, rather dazed, of the exhibit at the Courtauld in the summer before 9/11, where Lucy and I heard Dr. Saltz lecture. Not long after that, Dr. Saltz, like me, was a vocal critic of MORT.

  I ponder the title of the lecture Dr. Saltz delivered not even twenty-four hours ago. Civilian-Military Collaboration. That certainly sounds tame for the rabble-rousing Dr. Saltz, who is as jolting as an air-raid siren in his warnings that America’s two-hundred-plus-billion-dollar allocation to future combat systems— specifically, unmanned vehicles—has put us on the road to ultimate annihilation. Robots might seem to make sense when you consider sending them into the battlefield, he rails, but what happens when they come home like used Jeeps and other military surplus? Eventually they will find their way into the civilian world, and what we’ll have is more policing and surveillance, more insensate machines doing the jobs of humans, only these machines will be armed and equipped with cameras and recording devices.

  I’ve heard Dr. Saltz on the news, painting terrifying scenarios of “copbots” responding to crime scenes and unmanned “robo-cruisers” pursuing vehicles to write up occupants for traffic violations or hauling people in for outstanding warrants or, God forbid, getting a message from sensors to use force. Robots Tasering us. Robots shooting us to death. Robots that look like huge insects dragging our wounded and dead off a battlefield. Dr. Saltz testifying before the same Senate subcommittee I did but not at the same time. Both of us wreaking havoc for a technology company named Otwahl that I’d completely forgotten about until just hours ago.

  I’ve met him only once, when both of us happened to be on CNN and he pointed at me and quipped, “Autbotsies.”

  “I beg your pardon,” I answered, unclipping my mike as he walked onto the set.

  “Robotic autopsies. Someday they’ll take your place, my good doctor, maybe sooner than you think. We should have a drink after the show.”

  He was a bright-eyed man who looked like a lost hippie with his long, graying ponytail and wasted face, and he had the electricity of an exposed live wire. That was two years ago, and I should have taken him up on his invitation and waited around CNN. I should have had a drink with him. I should have gotten better versed in what he believes, because it isn’t all crazy. I haven’t seen him since then, although I can’t escape his presence in the media, and I try to recall if I’ve ever mentioned him to Fielding for any reason at all. I don’t think so. I can’t figure out why I would. Connections. What are they? I search some more.

  The University of Sheffield in South Yorkshire has an excellent medical school, that much I already know. Rerum Cognoscere Causas, its motto, to discover the causes of things, how apropos, how ironic. I need causes. Research, and I click on that. Global warming, global soil degradation, rethinking engineering with pioneering computer software, new findings in human embryonic stem cells’ DNA changes. I go back to the indented notes on the call sheet.

  MVF8/18/UK Min of Def Diary2/8.

  MVF is our abbreviation for motor-vehicle fatality, and I instigate another search, this time mining the CFC database. I enter MVF and the date 8/18, August 18 last summer, and a record is returned, the case of a twenty-year-old British man named Damien Patten who was killed in a taxicab accident in Boston. Fielding didn’t do the autopsy, one of my other MEs did, and in the narrative I notice that Damien Patten was a lance corporal in the 14 Signal Regiment and was on leave and had come to Boston to get married when he was killed in the taxicab accident. I get a funny feeling. Something registers.

  I execute another search using the keywords February 8 and UK Ministry of Defense Diary. I end up on its official news blog, and an entry in the diary lists British soldiers killed in Afghanistan yesterday. I run down the list of casualties, looking for anything that might mean something to me. A lance corporal from 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards. A lance sergeant from 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards. A kingsman from 2nd Battalion Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment. Then there is a sapper, or combat engineer, with the Counter-Improvised Explosive Device Task Force who was killed in the mountainous terrain of northwestern Afghanistan. In the Badghis P
rovince. Where my patient PFC Gabriel was killed on Sunday, February 7.

  I execute another search, although one detail I already know without having to look it up is how many NATO troops died in Afghanistan on February 7. At Dover, we always know. It’s as routine as preparing for ugly storms, a depressingly morbid report that controls our lives. Nine casualties, and four of them were Americans killed by the same roadside improvised explosive device that turned PFC Gabriel’s Humvee into a blast furnace. But again, that was on the seventh, not the eighth. It occurs to me that the British soldier who died on the eighth might have been injured the day before.

  I check and I’m right. The IED sapper, Geoffrey Miller, was twenty-three, recently married, and was wounded in a roadside bombing in the Badghis Province early Sunday but died the next day in a military medical center in Germany. Possibly the same roadside bombing that killed the Americans we took care of at Dover yesterday morning—in fact, it’s likely. I wonder if Sapper Miller and PFC Gabriel knew each other, and how the British man killed in a taxicab, Damien Patten, might be connected. Was Patten acquainted with Miller and Gabriel in Afghanistan, and what does Fielding have to do with any of this? How is Dr. Saltz or MORT or the dead man from Norton’s Woods connected, or are they?

  Miller’s body will be repatriated this Thursday, returned to his family in Oxford, England, I read on, but I can’t find anything else about him, although I certainly am capable of getting more information about a slain British soldier if I need it. I can call the press secretary Rockman. I can call Briggs, and I should, anyway, I remember. Briggs asked me—in fact, ordered me to—demanding that I keep him informed about the Norton’s Woods case, to wake him up if need be the minute I have information. But I won’t. No way. Not now. I’m not sure whom I can trust, and as that thought lingers, I realize the trouble I’m in.

  What does it say when you can’t ask for help from the very people you work with? It says everything, and it’s as if the ground is opening up beneath my feet and I’m falling into the unknown, a cold, lightless, empty space where I’ve been before. Briggs wanted to do an end run, to usurp my authority and transfer the Norton’s Woods case to Dover. Fielding has been sneaking around in my absence, meddling in affairs that are none of his business and even using my office, and now he’s ducking me, or at least I hope that’s all it is. My staff is committing mutiny, and any number of people, strangers to me, seem to know the details of my return home.

  It is almost two a.m., and I’m tempted to try the indented telephone number Fielding scribbled on a call sheet and surprise whoever answers, wake the person up and perhaps get a clue as to what is going on. Instead, I do a police computer search to see who or what the number with the 508 area code might belong to. The report summary shocks me, and for a moment I sit very still and try to calm myself. I try to push back the walls of dismay and confusion crowding in.

  Julia Gabriel, mother of PFC Gabriel.

  On the screen in front of me are her home and business addresses, her marital status, the salary she earns as a pharmacist in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the name of her only child and his age, which was nineteen when he died in Afghanistan on Sunday. I was on the phone with Mrs. Gabriel for the better part of an hour before I autopsied her son, trying to explain as gently as I could the impossibility of collecting his sperm while she raised her voice at me and cried and accused me of personal choices that aren’t mine to make and ones I didn’t make and would never make.

  Saving sperm from the dead and using it to impregnate the living isn’t something that causes me a moral dilemma. I really have no personal opinion about what truly is a medical and legal question, not a religious or ethical one, and the choice should be up to those involved, certainly not up to the practitioner. What matters to me is that the procedure, which has become increasingly popular because of the war, is done properly and legally, and my supposed views on posthumous reproduction rights were moot in PFC Gabriel’s case, anyway. His body was burned and decomposing, his pelvis so charred that his scrotum was gone and the vas deferens containing semen along with it, and I wasn’t about to tell Mrs. Gabriel that. I was as compassionate and gentle as I could be and didn’t take it personally as she vented her grief and rage on the last doctor her son would ever see on this earth.

  Peter had a girlfriend who was willing to have his children just like his friend was doing, it was a pact they’d made, Mrs. Gabriel went on, and I had no idea whose friend or what she was talking about. Peter’s friend told him of another friend who got killed in Boston on his wedding day this past summer, only Mrs. Gabriel never mentioned Damien Patten by name, the British man killed in a taxicab this past August 18. “All three of them dead now, three young beautiful boys dead,” Mrs. Gabriel said to me over the phone, and I had no idea who she was talking about. I think I do now. I think she meant Patten for sure, the friend of the friend whom PFC Gabriel had some sort of pact with. I wonder if the friend of Patten’s was this other casualty that Fielding seems to have led me to, Geoffrey Miller, an IED sapper.

  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.”