Port Mortuary Read online

  “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.”

  “Do we have an identification, and why Norton’s Woods? Does he live nearby? Is he a student at Harvard, maybe at the Divinity School?” It’s right around the corner from Norton’s Woods. “I doubt he was attending whatever this event was. Not if he had his dog with him.” I sound much calmer than I feel as we have this conversation in the parking lot of the Eagle’s Rest inn.

  “We don’t have many details yet, but it appears it was a wedding,” Marino says.

  “On Super Bowl Sunday? Who plans a wedding on the same day as the Super Bowl?”

  “Maybe if you don’t want anybody to show up. Maybe if you’re not American or are un-American. Hell if I know, but I don’t think the dead guy was
a wedding guest, and not just because of the dog. He had a Glock nine-mil under his jacket. No ID and was listening to a portable satellite radio, so you probably can guess where I’m going with this.”

  “I probably can’t.”

  “Lucy will tell you more about the satellite-radio part of it, but it appears he was doing surveillance, spying, and maybe whoever he was fucking with decided to return the favor. Bottom line, I’m thinking somebody did something to him, causing an injury that was somehow missed by the EMTs, and the removal service didn’t notice anything, either. So he’s zipped up in the pouch and starts bleeding during transport. Well, that wouldn’t happen unless he had a blood pressure, meaning he was still alive when he was delivered to the morgue and shut inside our damn cooler. Forty-something degrees in there and he would have died from exposure by this morning. Assuming he didn’t bleed to death first.”

  “If he has an injury that would cause him to bleed externally,” I reply, “why didn’t he bleed at the scene?”

  “You tell me.”

  “How long did they work on him?”

  “Fifteen, twenty minutes.”

  “Possible during resuscitation efforts a blood vessel was somehow punctured?” I ask. “Antemortem and postmortem injuries, if severe enough, can cause significant bleeding. For example, maybe during CPR a rib was fractured and caused a puncture wound or severed an artery? Any reason a chest tube might have been placed presumptively and that caused an injury and bleeding you’ve described?”

  But I know the answers even as I ask the questions. Marino is a veteran homicide detective and death investigator. He wouldn’t have commandeered my niece and her helicopter and come to Dover unannounced if there was a logical explanation or even a plausible one, and certainly Jack Fielding would know a legitimate injury from an accidental artifact. Why haven’t I heard from him?

  “The Cambridge Fire Department’s HQ is maybe a mile from Norton’s Woods, and the squad got to him within minutes,” Marino says.

  We are sitting in the van with the engine off. It is almost completely dark, the horizon and the sky melting into each other with only the faintest hint of light to the west. When has Fielding ever handled a disaster without me? Never. He absents himself. Leaves his messes for others to clean up. That’s why he’s not tried to get hold of me. Maybe he’s walked off the job again. How many times does he need to do that before I stop hiring him back?

  “According to them, he died instantly,” Marino adds.

  “Unless an IED blows someone into hundreds of pieces, there’s really no such thing as dying instantly,” I reply, and I hate it when Marino makes glib statements. Dying instantly. Dropping dead. Dead before he hit the ground. Twenty years of these generalities, no matter how many times I’ve told him that cardiac and respiratory arrests aren’t causes of death but symptoms of dying, and clinical death takes minutes at least. It isn’t instant. It isn’t a simple process. I remind him again of this medical fact because I can’t think of anything else to say.

  “Well, I’m just reporting what I’ve been told, and according to them, he couldn’t be resuscitated,” Marino answers, as if the EMTs know more about death than I do. “Was unresponsive. That’s what’s on their run sheet.”

  “You interviewed them?”

  “One of them. On the phone this morning. No pulse, no nothing. The guy was dead. Or that’s what the paramedic said. But what do you think he’s going to say—that they weren’t sure but sent him to the morgue anyway?”

  “Then you told him why you were asking.”

  “Hell, no, I’m not retarded. You don’t need this on the front page of the Globe. This hits the news, I may as well go back to NYPD or maybe get a job with Wackenhut, except no one’s hiring.”

  “What procedure did you follow?”

  “I didn’t follow shit. It was Fielding. Of course, he says he did everything by the book, says Cambridge PD told him there was nothing suspicious about the scene, an apparent natural death that was witnessed. Fielding gave permission for the body to be transferred to the CFC as long as the cops took custody of the gun and got it to the labs right away so we could find out who it’s registered to. A routine case, and not our fault if the EMTs fucked up, or so Fielding says, and you know what I say? It won’t matter. We’ll get blamed. The media will go after us like nothing you’ve ever seen and will say everything should move back to Boston. Imagine that?”

  Before the CFC began doing its first cases this past summer, the state medical examiner’s office was located in Boston and was besieged by political and economic problems and scandals that were constantly in the news. Bodies were lost or sent to the wrong funeral homes or cremated without a thorough examination, and in at least one suspected child-abuse death the wrong eyeballs were tested. New chiefs came and went, and district offices had to be shut down due to a lack of funding. But nothing negative ever said about that office could compare to what Marino is suggesting about us.

  “I’d rather not imagine anything.” I open my door. “I’d rather focus on the facts.”

  “That’s a problem, since we don’t seem to have any that make much sense.”

  “And you told Briggs what you just told me?”

  “I told him what he needed to know,” Marino says.

  “The same thing you just told me?” I repeat my question.

  “Pretty much.”

  “You shouldn’t have. It was for me to tell. It was for me to decide what he needs to know.” I’m sitting with the passenger’s door open wide and the wind blowing in. I’m damp from the shower and chilled. “You don’t raise things up the chain just because I’m busy.”

  “Well, you were busy as hell, and I told him.”

  I climb out of the van and reassure myself that what Marino has just described can’t be accurate. Cambridge EMTs would never make such a disastrous mistake, and I try to conjure up an explanation for why a fatal wound didn’t bleed at the scene and then bled profusely, and I contemplate computing time of death or even the cause of it for someone who died inside a morgue refrigerator. I’m confounded. I haven’t a clue, and most of all I worry about him, this young man delivered to my door, presumed dead. I envision him wrapped in a sheet and zipped inside a pouch, and it’s the stuff of old horrors. Someone coming to inside a casket. Someone buried alive. I’ve never had such a ghastly thing happen, not even close, not once in my career. I’ve never known anyone who has.

  “At least there’s no sign he tried to get out of the body bag.” Marino tries to make both of us feel better. “Nothing to indicate he might have been awake at some point and started panicking. You know, like clawing at the zipper or kicking or something. I guess if he struggled he would have been in a weird position on the tray when we found him this morning, or maybe rolled off it. Except I wonder if you would suffocate in one of those bags, now that I think of it. I guess so, since they’re supposed to be water-tight. Even though they leak. You show me a body bag that doesn’t leak. And that’s the other thing. Blood drips on the floor leading from the bay to the fridge.”

  “Why don’t we continue this later.” It’s check-in time. There are plenty of people in the parking lot as we walk toward the inn’s modern but plain stucco entrance, and Marino has a big voice that projects as if he’s perpetually talking inside an amphitheater.

  “I doubt Fielding has bothered to watch the recording,” Marino adds anyway. “I doubt he’s done a damn thing. I haven’t seen or heard from the son of a bitch since first thing this morning. MIA once again, just like he’s done before.” He opens the glass front door. “I sure as hell hope he doesn’t shut us down. Wouldn’t that be something? You do him a fucking favor and give him a job after he walked off the last one, and he destroys the CFC before it’s even off the ground.”

  Inside the lobby with its showcases of awards and air force memorabilia, its comfortable chairs and big-screen TV, a sign welcomes guests to the home of the C-5 Galaxy and C-17 Globe-master III. At the front desk I si
lently wait behind a man in the muted pixilated tiger stripes of army combat uniforms, or ACUs, as he buys shaving cream, water, and several mini bottles of Johnnie Walker Scotch. I tell the clerk that I’m checking out earlier than planned, and yes, I’ll remember to turn in my keys, and of course I understand I’ll be charged the usual government rate of thirty-eight dollars for the day even though I’m not staying the night.

  “What is it they say?” Marino goes on. “No good deed goes unpunished.”

  “Let’s try not to be quite so negative.”

  “You and me both gave up good positions in New York, and we shut down the office in Watertown, and this is what we’re left with.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “I hope like hell we didn’t ruin our careers,” he says.

  I don’t answer him because I’ve heard enough. Past the business center and vending machines, we take the stairs to the second floor, and it is now that he informs me that Lucy isn’t waiting with the helicopter at the Civil Air Terminal. She’s in my room. She’s packing my belongings, touching them, making decisions about them, emptying my closet, my drawers, disconnecting my laptop, printer, and wireless router. He’s waited to tell me because he knows damn well that under ordinary circumstances, this would annoy me beyond measure—doesn’t matter if it’s my computer-genius, former-federal-law-enforcement niece, whom I’ve raised like a daughter.

  Circumstances are anything but ordinary, and I’m relieved that Marino is here and Lucy is in my room, that they have come for me. I need to get home and fix everything. We follow the long hallway carpeted in deep red, past the balcony arranged with colonial reproductions and an electronic massage chair thoughtfully placed there for weary pilots. I insert my magnetic key card into the lock of my room, and I wonder who let Lucy in, and then I think of Briggs again and I think of CNN. I can’t imagine appearing on TV. What if the media has gotten word of what’s happened in Cambridge? I would know that by now. Marino would know it. My administrator Bryce would know it, and he would tell me right away. Everything is going to be fine.