Port Mortuary Read online

  Lucy is sitting on my neatly made bed, zipping up my cosmetic case, and I detect the clean citrus scent of her shampoo as I hug her and feel how much I’ve missed her. A black flight suit accentuates her bold green eyes and short rose-gold hair, her sharp features and leanness, and I’m reminded of how stunning she is in an unusual way, boyish but feminine, athletically chiseled but with breasts, and so intense she looks fierce. Doesn’t matter if she’s being playful or polite, my niece tends to intimidate and has few friends, maybe none except Marino, and her lovers never last. Not even Jaime, although I haven’t voiced my suspicions. I haven’t asked. But I don’t buy Lucy’s story that she moved from New York to Boston for financial reasons. Even if her forensic computer investigative company was in a decline, and I don’t believe that, either, she was making more in Manhattan than she’s now paid by the CFC, which is nothing. My niece works for me pro bono. She doesn’t need money.

  “What’s this about the satellite radio?” I watch her carefully, trying to interpret her signals, which are always subtle and perplexing.

  Caplets rattle as she checks how many Advil are in a bottle, deciding not enough to bother with, and she clunks it in the trash. “We’ve got weather, so I’d like to get out of here.” She takes the cap off a bottle of Zantac, tossing that next. “We’ll talk as we fly, and I’ll need your help copiloting, because it’s going to be tricky dodging snow showers and freezing rain en route. We’re supposed to get up to a foot at home, starting around ten.”

  My first thought is Norton’s Woods. I need to pay a retrospective visit, but by the time I get there, it will be covered in snow. “That’s unfortunate,” I comment. “We may have a crime scene that was never worked as one.”

  “I told Cambridge PD to go back over there this morning.” Marino’s eyes probe and wander as if it is my quarters that need to be searched. “They didn’t find anything.”

  “Did they ask you why you wanted them to look?” That concern again.

  “I said we had questions. I blamed it on the Glock. The serial number’s been ground off. Guess I didn’t tell you that,” he adds as he looks around, looking at everything but me.

  “Firearms can try acid on it, see if we can restore the serial number that way. If all else fails, we’ll try the large-chamber SEM,” I decide. “If there’s anything left, we’ll find it. And I’ll ask Jack to go to Norton’s Woods and do a retrospective.”

  “Right. I’m sure he’ll get right on it,” Marino says sarcastically. “He can take photographs before the snow starts,” I add. “Or someone can. Whoever’s on call—”

  “Waste of time,” Marino says, cutting me off. “None of us was there yesterday. We don’t know the exact damn spot—only that it was near a tree and a green bench. Well, that’s a lot of help when you’re talking about six acres of trees and green benches.”

  “What about photographs?” I ask as Lucy continues going through my small pharmacy of ointments, analgesics, antacids, vitamins, eyedrops, and hand sanitizers spread over the bed. “The police must have taken pictures of the body in situ.”

  “I’m still waiting for the detective to get those to me. The guy who responded to the scene, he brought in the pistol this morning. Lester Law, goes by Les Law, but on the street he’s known as Lawless, just like his father and grandfather before him. Cambridge cops going back to the fucking Mayflower. I’ve never met him.”

  “I think that about does it.” Lucy gets up from the bed. “You might want to make sure I didn’t miss anything,” she says to me.

  Wastebaskets are overflowing, and my bags are packed and lined up by a wall, the closet door open wide, nothing inside but empty hangers. Computer equipment, printed files, journal articles, and books are gone from my desk, and there is nothing in the dirty-clothes hamper or bathroom or in the dresser drawers I check. I open the small refrigerator, and it is empty and has been wiped clean. While she and Marino begin carrying my belongings out, I enter Briggs’s number into my iPhone. I look out at the three-story stucco building on the other side of the parking lot, at the large plate-glass window in the middle of the third floor. Last night I was in that suite with him and other colleagues, watching the game, and life was good. We cheered for the New Orleans Saints and ourselves, and we toasted the Pentagon and its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, which had made CT-assisted virtual autopsies possible at Dover and now at the CFC. We celebrated mission accomplished, a job well done, and now this, as if last night wasn’t real, as if I dreamed it.

  I take a deep breath and press send on my iPhone, going hollow inside. Briggs can’t be happy with me. Images flash on the wall-mounted flat-screen TV in his living room, and then he walks past the glass, dressed in the combat uniform of the army, green and sandy brown with a mandarin collar, what he typically wears when he’s not in the morgue or at a scene. I watch him answer his phone and return to his big window, where he stands, looking directly at me. From a distance we are face-to-face, an expanse of tarmac and parked cars between the armed forces chief medical examiner and me, as if we’re about to have a standoff.

  “Colonel.” His voice greets me somberly.

  “I just heard. And I assure you I’m taking care of this, will be on the helicopter within the hour.”

  “You know what I always say,” his deep, authoritative voice sounds in my earpiece, and I try to detect the degree of his bad mood and what he’s going to do. “There’s an answer to everything. The problem is finding it and figuring out the best way to do that. The proper and appropriate way to do that.” He’s cool. He’s cautious. He’s very serious. “We’ll do this another time,” he adds.

  He means the final briefing we were scheduled to have. I’m sure he also means CNN, and I wonder what Marino told him. What exactly did he say?

  “I agree, John. Everything should be canceled.”

  “It has been.”

  “Which is smart.” I’m matter-of-fact. I won’t let him sense my insecurities, and I know he sniffs for them. I know damn well he does. “My first priority is to determine if the information reported to me is correct. Because I don’t see how it can be.”

  “Not a good time for you to go on the air. I don’t need Rockman to tell us that.”

  Rockman is the press secretary. Briggs doesn’t need to talk to him because he already has. I’m sure of it.

  “I understand,” I reply.

  “Remarkable timing. If I was paranoid, I might just think someone has orchestrated some sort of bizarre sabotage.”

  “Based on what I’ve been told, I don’t see how that would be possible.”

  “I said if I was paranoid,” Briggs replies, and from where I stand, I can make out his formidable sturdy shape but can’t see the expression on his face. I don’t need to see it. He’s not smiling. His gray eyes are galvanized steel.

  “The timing is either a coincidence or it’s not,” I say. “The basic tenet in criminal investigations, John. It’s always one or the other.”

  “Let’s not trivialize this.”

  “I’m doing anything but.”

  “If a living person was put in your damn cooler, I can’t think of much worse,” he says flatly.

  “We don’t know—”

  “It’s just a damn shame after all this.” As if everything we’ve built over the past few years is on the precipice of ruin.

  “We don’t know that what’s been reported is accurate—” I start to say.

  “I think it would be best if we bring the body here,” he interrupts again. “AFDIL can work on the identification. Rockman will make sure the situation is well contained. We’ve got everything we need right here.”

  I’m stunned. Briggs wants to send a plane to Hanscom Field, the air force base affiliated with the CFC. He wants the Armed Forces DNA Identification Lab and probably other military labs and someone other than me to handle whatever has happened, because he doesn’t think I’m competent. He doesn’t trust me.

  “We don’t know if we
’re talking about federal jurisdiction,” I remind him. “Unless you know something I don’t.”

  “Look. I’m trying to do what’s best for all involved.” Briggs has his hands behind his back, his legs slightly spread, staring across the parking lot at me. “I’m suggesting we can dispatch a C-Seventeen to Hanscom. We can have the body here by midnight. The CFC is a port mortuary, too, and that’s what port mortuaries do.”

  “That’s not what port mortuaries do. The point isn’t for bodies to be received, then transferred elsewhere for autopsies and lab analysis. The CFC was never intended to be a first screening for Dover, a preliminary check before the experts step in. That was never my mandate, and it wasn’t the agreement when thirty million dollars was spent on the facility in Cambridge.”

  “You should just stay at Dover, Kay, and we’ll bring the body here.”

  “I’m requesting you refrain from intervening, John. Right now this case is the jurisdiction of the chief medical examiner of Massachusetts. Please don’t challenge me or my authority.”

  A long pause, then he states rather than asks, “You really want that responsibility.”

  “It’s mine whether I want it or not.”

  “I’m trying to protect you. I’ve been trying.”

  “Don’t.” That’s not what he’s trying. He doesn’t have confidence in me.

  “I can deploy Captain Avallone to help. It’s not a bad idea.”

  I can’t believe he would suggest that, either. “That won’t be necessary,” I reply firmly. “The CFC is perfectly capable of handling this.”

  “I’m on the record as having offered.”

  On the record with whom? It occurs to me uncannily that someone else is on the line or within earshot. Briggs is still standing in front of his window. I can’t tell if anyone else might be in the suite with him.

  “Whatever you decide,” he then says. “I’m not going to step on you. Call me as soon as you know something. Wake me up if you have to.” He doesn’t say good-bye or good luck or it was nice having me here for half a year.

  2

  Lucy and Marino have left my room. My suitcases, rucksacks, and Bankers Boxes are gone, and there is nothing left. It is as if I was never here, and I feel alone in a way I haven’t for years, maybe decades.

  I look around one last time, making sure nothing has been forgotten, my attention wandering past the microwave, the small refrigerator-freezer and coffeemaker, the windows with their view of the parking lot and Briggs’s lighted suite, and beyond, the black sky over the void of the empty golf course. Thick clouds pass over the oblong moon, and it glows on and off like a signal lantern, as if telling me what is coming down the tracks and if I should stop or go, and I can’t see the stars at all. I worry that the bad weather is moving fast, carried on the same strong south wind that brings in the big planes and their sad cargo. I should hurry, but I’m distracted by the bathroom mirror, by the person in it, and I pause to look at myself in the glare of fluorescent lights. Who are you now? Who really?

  My blue eyes and short blond hair, the strong shape of my face and figure, aren’t so different, I decide, are remarkably the same, considering my age. I have held up well in my windowless places of concrete and stainless steel, and much of it is genetic, an inherited will to thrive in a family as tragic as a Verdi opera. The Scarpettas are from hearty Northern Italian stock, with prominent features, fair skin and hair, and well-defined muscle and bone that stubbornly weather hardship and the abuses of self-indulgence most people wouldn’t associate with me. But the inclinations are there, a passion for food, for drink, for all things desired by the flesh, no matter how destructive. I crave beauty and feel deeply, but I’m an aberration, too. I can be unflinching and impervious. I can be immutable and unrelenting, and these behaviors are learned. I believe they are necessary. They aren’t natural to me, not to anyone in my volatile, dramatic family, and that much I know is true about what I come from. The rest I’m not so sure about.

  My ancestors were farmers and worked for the railroads, but in recent years my mother has added artists, philosophers, martyrs, and God knows what to the mix as she has set about to research our genealogy. According to her, I’m descended from artisans who built the high altar and choir stalls and made the mosaics at Saint Mark’s Basilica and created the fresco ceiling of the Chiesa dell’Angelo San Raffaele. Somehow I have a number of friars and monks in my past, and most recently—based on what I don’t know—I share blood with the painter Caravaggio, who was a murderer, and have some tenuous link to the mathematician and astronomer Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for heresy during the Roman Inquisition.

  My mother still lives in her small house in Miami and is pre-possessed with her efforts to explain me. I’m the only physician in the family tree that she knows of, and she doesn’t understand why I’ve chosen patients who are dead. Neither my mother nor my only sibling, Dorothy, could possibly fathom that I might be partly defined by the terrors of a childhood consumed by tending to my terminally ill father before I became the head of the household at the age of twelve. By intuition and training, I’m an expert in violence and death. I’m at war with suffering and pain. Somehow I always end up in charge or to blame. It never fails.

  I shut the door on what has been my home not just for six months but more than that, really. Briggs has managed to remind me where I’m from and headed. It’s a course that was set long before this past July, as long ago as 1987, when I knew my destiny was public service and didn’t know how I could repay my medical-school debt. I allowed something as mundane as money, something as shameful as ambition, to change everything irrevocably and not in a good way—indeed, in the worst way. But I was young and idealistic. I was proud and wanted more, not understanding then that more is always less if you can’t be sated.

  Having gotten full rides through parochial school and Cornell and Georgetown Law, I could have begun my professional life unburdened by the obligations of debt. But I’d turned down Bowman Gray Medical School because I wanted Johns Hopkins badly. I wanted it as badly as I’d ever wanted anything, and I went there without benefit of financial aid, and what I ended up owing was impossible. My only recourse was to accept a military scholarship as some of my peers had done, including Briggs, who I was acquainted with in the earliest stage of my profession, when I was assigned to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, the AFIP, the parent organization of the AFME. A quiet stint of reviewing military autopsy reports at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., Briggs led me to believe, and once my debt was paid, I’d move on to a solid position in civilian legal medicine.

  What I didn’t plan on was South Africa in December of ’87, what was summertime on that distant continent. Noonie Pieste and Joanne Rule were filming a documentary and about my same age when they were tied up in chairs, beaten, and hacked, broken bottle glass shoved up their vaginas, their windpipes torn out. Racially motivated crimes against two young Americans. “You’re going to Cape Town,” Briggs said to me. “To investigate and bring them home.” Apartheid propaganda. Lies and more lies. Why them and why me?

  As I take the stairs down to the lobby, I tell myself not to think about this right now. Why am I thinking about it at all? But I know why. I was yelled at over the phone this morning. I was called names, and what happened more than two decades ago is now before me again. I remember autopsy reports that vanished and my luggage gone through. I remember being certain I would turn up dead, a convenient accident or suicide, or staged murder, like those two women I still see in my head. I see them as clearly as I did then, pale and stiff on steel tables, their blood washing through drains in the floor of a morgue so primitive we used handsaws to open their skulls, and there was no x-ray machine, and I had to bring my own camera.

  I drop off my key at the front desk and replay the conversation I just had with Briggs, and I have clarity. I don’t know why I didn’t see the truth instantly, and I think of his remote tone, his chilly deliberateness, as I
watched him through glass. I’ve heard him talk this way before, but usually it is directed at others when there is a problem of a magnitude that places it out of his hands. This is about more than his personal opinion of me. This is about something beyond his typical calculations and our conflicted past.

  Someone has gotten to him, and it wasn’t the press secretary, not anyone at Dover but higher up than that. I feel certain Briggs conferred with Washington after Marino divulged information, running his mouth and spinning his wild speculations before I’d had the chance to say a word. Marino shouldn’t have discussed the Cambridge case or me. He’s set something into motion he doesn’t understand, because there’s a lot he doesn’t understand. He’s never been military. He’s never worked for the federal government and is clueless about international affairs. His idea of bureaucracy and intrigue is local police department policies, what he rubber-stamps as bullshit. He has no concept of power, the kind of power that can tilt a presidential election or start a war.

  Briggs would not have suggested sending a military plane to Massachusetts for the transfer of a body to Dover unless he’s gotten clearance from the Department of Defense, the DoD—in other words, the Pentagon. A decision has been made and I’m not part of it. Outside, in the parking lot, I climb into the van and won’t look at Marino, I’m so angry.

  “Tell me more about the satellite radio,” I say to Lucy, because I intend to get to the bottom of this. I intend to find out what Briggs knows or has been led to believe.

  “A Sirius Stiletto,” Lucy says from the dark backseat as I turn up the heat because Marino is always hot while the rest of us freeze. “It’s basically nothing more than storage for files, plus a power source. Of course, it also works as a portable XM radio, just as it’s designed to, but it’s the headphones that are creative. Not ingenious but technically clever.”