Port Mortuary (2010) ks-18 Read online

  “Well, it’s obvious when you look at the metal shavings some of them are recent because they haven’t started rusting and are really shiny,” Marino replies. “So we got samples, and they’ve gone to the labs to find out if under the scope they look anything like what you found in Eli Saltz’s body.”

  “His last name isn’t Saltz,” I remind him for the umpteenth time.

  “You know, to compare tool marks,” Marino says. “Not that there’s much of a reason to doubt what Fielding did. We found the box.”

  The box the WASP came in.

  “A couple spent CO-two cartridges, a couple extra handles, even the instruction book,” Marino goes on. “The whole nine yards. According to the company, Jack ordered it two years ago. Maybe because of his scuba diving.” He shrugs his big shoulders in his big yellow suit. “Don’t know, except he didn’t order it two years ago to kill Eli. That’s for damn sure, and two years ago Jack was in Chicago, and I guess you might ask what he needed a WASP for.” Marino walks around in his big green boots and keeps looking at the opening to the stairs leading down, as if he’s curious about what’s being said and done down there. “The only thing that will kill you in the Great Lakes that I know of is all the mercury in the fish.”

  “It’s with us. We have the box and the CO-two cartridges. We have all of it.” I want to know which labs. I want to make sure Briggs isn’t sending my evidence to the AFME labs in Dover.

  “Yeah, all that stuff. Except the knife that was in the box, the WASP itself. It still hasn’t shown up. My guess is he ditched it after stabbing the guy, maybe threw if off a bridge or something. No wonder he didn’t want anyone going to the Norton’s Woods scene, right?” Marino’s bloodshot eyes look at me, then distractedly look around, the way people act when nothing they are looking at is new. He’d been here many hours before I showed up.

  “What about in here?” I squat in front of the fireplace, which is open and built of old firebrick that is probably original to the building. “What’s been done here?” My hard hat keeps slipping over my eyes, and I take it off and set it on the floor.

  “What about it?” Marino watches me from where he’s standing.

  I move my gloved finger toward the whitish ashes, and they are weightless, lifting and stirring as the air moves, as if my thoughts are moving them. I contemplate the best way to preserve what I’m seeing, the ashes much too fragile to move in toto, and I’m pretty sure I recognize what has happened in the fireplace, or at least some of what occurred. I’ve seen this before but not recently, maybe not in at least ten years. When documents are burned these days, usually they were printed, not typed, and were generated on inexpensive copying paper with a high wood-pulp content that combusts incompletely, creating a lot of black sooty ash. Paper with a high cotton-rag content has a completely different appearance when it is burned, and what comes to mind immediately is Erica Donahue’s letter that she claims she never wrote.

  “What I recommend,” I say to Marino, “is we cover the fireplace so the ashes aren’t disturbed. We need to photograph them in situ before disturbing them in any way. So let’s do that before we collect them in paint cans for the documents lab.”

  His big booted feet move closer, and he says, “What for?”

  What he’s really asking is why I am acting like a crime scene investigator. My answer, should I give one, which I won’t, is because somebody has to.

  “Let’s finish this the way it should be done, the way we know how and have always done things.” I meet his glassy stare, and what I’m really saying is nothing is over. I don’t care what everyone assumes. It’s not over until it is.

  “Let’s see what you’ve got.” He squats next to me, our yellow suits making a plastic sound as we move around, and their faint odor reminds me of a new shower curtain.

  “Typed characters on the ash.” I point, and the ashes stir again.

  “Now you’re a psychic and ought to get a job in one of the magic shops around here if you can read something that’s been burned.”

  “You can read some of it because the expensive paper burns clean, turns white, and the inked characters made by a typewriter can be seen. We’ve looked at things like this before, Marino. Just not in a long time. Do you see what I’m looking at?” I point, and the air moves and the ashes stir some more. “You can actually see the inked engraving of her letterhead, or part of it. Boston and part of the zip code. The same zip code on the letter I got from Mrs. Donahue, although she says she didn’t write it and her typewriter is missing.”

  “Well, there’s one in the house. A green one, an old portable on the dining-room table.” He gets up and bends his legs as if his knees ache.

  “There’s a green typewriter next door?”

  “I figured Benton told you.”

  “I guess he couldn’t tell me everything in an hour.”

  “Don’t get pissed. He probably couldn’t. You won’t believe all the shit next door. Appears when Fielding moved here he never really moved his shit in. Boxes everywhere. A fucking landfill over there.”

  “I doubt he had a portable typewriter. I doubt that’s his.”

  “Unless he was in cahoots with the Donahue kid. That’s the theory of where a lot of shit has come from.”

  “Not according to his mother. Johnny disliked Jack. So how does it make sense that Jack would have Mrs. Donahue’s typewriter?”

  “If it’s hers. We don’t know it is. And then there’s the drugs,” Marino says. “Obviously, Johnny’s been on them since about the time he started taking tae kwon do lessons from Fielding. One plus one equals two, right?”

  “We’re going to find out what adds up and what doesn’t. What about stationery or paper?”

  “Didn’t see any.”

  “Except what seems to be in here.” I remind him it appears some of Erica Donahue’s stationery might have been burned, or maybe all of it was, whatever was left over from the letter someone wrote to me, pretending to be her.

  “Listen…” Marino doesn’t finish what he’s about to say.

  He doesn’t need to. I know what he’s going to say. He’s going to remind me I can’t be reasonable about Fielding, and Marino thinks he should know, all right. Because of our own history. Marino was around in the early days, too. He remembers when Fielding was my forensic pathology fellow in Richmond, my protege, and in the minds of a lot of people, it seems, a lot more than that.

  “This was here just like this?” I then ask, indicating a roll of lead-gray duct tape on the workbench.

  “Okay. Sure,” he says as he squats by an open crime scene case on the floor and gets out an evidence bag, because the roll of tape can be fracture-matched to the last strip torn off it. “So tell me how the hell he might have gotten hold of it, and what for?”

  He means Fielding. How did Jack Fielding get hold of Erica Donahue’s typewriter, and what was his purpose in writing a letter allegedly from her and having it hand-delivered to me by a driver-for-hire who usually works events like bar mitzvahs and weddings? Did Johnny Donahue give Fielding the typewriter and stationery? If so, why? Maybe Fielding simply manipulated Johnny. Lured him into a trap.

  “Maybe a last-ditch effort to frame the kid,” Marino then says, answering his own question and voicing what I’m pondering and about to dismiss as a possibility. “A good question for Benton.”

  But Benton is off somewhere, talking on his phone or maybe conferring with his FBI compatriots, maybe with the female agent named Douglas. It bothers me when I think about her, and I hope I’m just paranoid and raw and have no reason to be concerned about the nature of his relationship with Special Agent Douglas. I hope the extra coffee cup in the back of her SUV wasn’t Benton’s, that he hasn’t been riding around with her, spending a lot of time with her while I was at Dover and then before that, in and out of Washington. Not just an enabler and a bad mentor, now I’m a bad wife, it occurs to me. Everything feels wrecked. It feels over with. It feels as if I’m working my own death scene, as
if the life I knew somehow didn’t survive while I was away, and I’m investigating, trying to reconstruct what did me in.

  “This is what we need to do right now,” I tell Marino. “I assume no one has touched the typewriter, and is it an Olivetti, or do you know?”

  “We’ve been pretty tied up over here.” What he’s saying is that the police have more important matters to tend to than an old manual typewriter. “We found the dog in there, like I told you. And a bedroom it appears Fielding was using, and you can tell he was in and out living here, but this is where it happened.” He indicates the outbuilding we’re in. “The typewriter’s in a case on the dining-room table. I opened it to see what was inside, but that’s it.”

  “Swab the keys for DNA before you pack it up and transport it to the labs, and I want those swabs going out on the next evidence run the van makes. I want those swabs analyzed first, because they might tell us who wrote that letter to me,” I tell him.

  “I think we know who.”

  “Then the typewriter goes to Documents so we can compare the typeface to what’s on the letter I got, a cursive typeface, and we’ll analyze the duct tape that’s on the envelope and see if it came from the roll we just found and what trace is on it or DNA or fingerprints or who knows what. Don’t be surprised if it points to the Donahues. If trace is from their house or fingerprints or DNA is from that source.”

  “Why?”

  “Framing their son.”

  “I didn’t know Jack was that damn smart,” Marino says.

  “I didn’t say he framed anyone. I’ve not tried and convicted him or anyone,” I reply flatly. “We have his DNA profile and fingerprints for exclusionary purposes, just as we have all of ours. So he should be easy to include or exclude, and any other profiles, and if there are? If we find DNA from more than once source, which we certainly should expect? We run the profiles through CODIS immediately.”

  “Sure. If that’s what you want.”

  “We run them right away, Marino. Because we know where Jack is. But if anyone else is involved, including the Donahues? We can’t waste time.”

  “Sure, Doc. Whatever you want,” Marino says, and I can read his thoughts.

  This is Jack Fielding’s house, it’s his Kill Cellar, his Little Shop of Horrors. Why go to all this trouble? But Marino’s not going to say it to me. He’s assuming I’m in denial. I’m holding out the remote and irrational hope that Fielding didn’t kill anyone, that someone else magically was using his property and his belongings and is responsible for all of this, someone other than Fielding, who is the victim and not the monster everyone now believes he is.

  “We don’t know if his family’s been here,” I remind Marino patiently and quietly, but in a sobering tone. “His wife, his two little girls. We don’t know who’s been in the house and touched things.”

  “Not unless they’ve been coming here from Chicago to stay in this dump.”

  “When exactly did they move out of Concord?” That’s where his family was living with him, in a house Fielding had rented that I helped him find.

  “Last fall. And it fits with everything,” Marino makes yet one more assumption. “The football player and what happened after Fielding’s family moved back to Chicago and he came here, fixing up this place while he was living in it like a hobo. He could have sent you a goddamn e-mail and let you know it wasn’t working out for him personally around here. That his wife and kids bolted not long after the CFC started taking cases.”

  “He didn’t tell me. I’m sorry he didn’t.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t say I should have.” Marino seals the roll of duct tape in a plastic evidence bag. “It wasn’t my business. I wasn’t going to start out my new career here by ratting on the staff and telling you that Fielding was the usual fuck-up right out of the box and you sure as hell should have expected it when you thought it was such a brilliant idea to take him back.”

  “I should have expected this?” I hold Marino’s bloodshot, resentful stare.

  “Put on your hard hat before you go down. There’s a lot of shit hanging from the ceilings, like all these damn lights strung up like it’s Christmas. I got to go back out to the truck, and I know you need a minute.”

  I adjust the ratchet of my hard hat, making it tighter, and the reason Marino isn’t going into the cellar with me isn’t because I need a minute. It isn’t because he’s sensitive enough to offer me a chance to deal with what’s down there without him by my side, breathing down my neck. That might be what he’s talked himself into, but as I listen to him swishing his boots in the tubs just outside the door, stepping in and out of the water, I can only imagine how distasteful a scene like this must be to him. It has little to do with the unpleasantness of body fluids thawing and breaking down or even his squeamishness about hepatitis or HIV or some other virus and everything to do with how the body fluids got here. Marino’s ablution in the plastic tubs filled with water and dish-washing fluid are his attempt to cleanse himself of the guilt I know he feels.

  He never saw Fielding doing any of it, and that’s the problem Marino faces. The way he would think about it is he should have noticed, and as I’ve explained to Benton while we were driving here and then explained to Marino over the phone, the extraction of sperm isn’t much different from a vasectomy, except when such a procedure is performed on a dead body, it’s even quicker and simpler, for obvious reasons. No local anesthesia is needed, and the doctor doesn’t have to be concerned with how the patient is feeling or if he might have second thoughts or any other emotional response.

  All Fielding had to do was make a small puncture on one side of the scrotum and inject a needle into the vas deferens to extract sperm. He could have done this in minutes. He probably didn’t do it during the autopsy but before it by going into the cooler when nobody was around, making certain he got to the body as quickly after death as possible, which in retrospect might explain why he noticed the man from Norton’s Woods was bleeding before anybody else did. Fielding went into the cooler first thing when he got to the building early Monday morning to acquire his latest involuntary sperm donation, and that’s when he noticed blood in the tray under the body bag. So he walked rapidly down the corridor and notified Anne and Ollie.

  If anybody would have noticed something like this going on during the six months I was at Dover it was Anne, I told Marino. She never saw what Fielding was doing or had a clue, and we know he extracted sperm from at least a hundred patients based on what has been found in a freezer in the cellar and what’s broken all over the floor, potentially a hundred thousand dollars, maybe much more, depending on what he charged and if he did it on a sliding scale, taking into account what the family or other interested party could afford. Liquid gold, as cops are calling what Fielding was selling on a black market of his own creation, and I can’t stop thinking about his choice of Eli as an involuntary donor, assuming this was Fielding’s intention, and we’ll never really know.

  But at the time Fielding went into the cooler yesterday morning, there was only one young male body fresh enough to be a suitable candidate for a sperm extraction, and that was Eli Goldman. The other male case was elderly, and it’s highly unlikely he had loved ones who might be interested in buying his semen, and a third case was a female. If Fielding murdered Eli with the injection knife, would he then be so brazen and reckless as to take the young man’s sperm, and who was he planning to sell it to without incriminating himself? If he’d tried something like that, he may as well have confessed to the homicide.

  It continues to tug at my thoughts that Fielding didn’t know who the unidentified dead young male was when he was notified about the case on Sunday afternoon. Fielding didn’t bother going to the scene, wasn’t interested, and had no reason at that time to be interested. I continue to suspect he didn’t have a clue until he walked into the cooler, and then he recognized Eli Goldman because they had a connection somehow. Maybe it was drugs, and that’s why Eli had one of Fielding’s guns. Maybe Field
ing had given or sold the Glock to Eli. For sure someone did. Drugs, the gun, maybe something else. If only I could have been in Fielding’s mind when he walked into the cooler at shortly after seven yesterday morning. Then I would know. I would know everything.

  I move a hanging light out of my way so it doesn’t knock my hard hat as I go down stone steps in my bulky yellow suit and big rubber boots.

  A cold sweat is rolling down my sides, and I am worrying about Briggs and what it will be like when I’m confronted with him, and I’m worrying about a greyhound named Sock. I am worrying about everything I can possibly worry about because I can’t bear what I’m about to see, but it is better this way, and as much as I complain about Marino, he really did do the right thing. I wouldn’t have wanted Fielding’s body transported to the CFC. I wouldn’t want to see it for the first time in a pouch on a steel gurney or tray. Marino knows me well enough to decide that given the choice, I would demand to see Fielding the way he died, to satisfy myself that it was exactly as it appears, and that what Briggs determined when he examined the body hours earlier is the same thing I observe and that Briggs and I share the same opinion about Fielding’s cause and manner of death.

  The cellar is whitewashed stone with a vaulted stone ceiling and no windows, and it is too small a space for so many people, all of them dressed the way I am, in bright yellow with thick black gloves and green rubber boots and bright yellow hard hats. Some people have on face shields, others surgical masks, and I recognize my own scientists, three from the DNA lab, who are swabbing an area of the stone floor that is littered with shattered glass test tubes and their black plastic stoppers. Nearby is the space heater Marino mentioned, and an upright stainless-steel laboratory cryogenic freezer, the same make and model that we use in labs where we have to store biological samples at ultra-low temperatures.

  The freezer door is open wide, the adjustable shelves inside empty because someone, presumably Fielding, removed all the specimens and smashed them to the stone floor, then turned on the space heater. I notice partial labels adhering to glass fragments on a floor that is otherwise clean, the cellar appearing whitewashed with something nonglossy, like primer, like a wine-maker’s cave that has been turned into a laboratory with a steel sink and steel countertop, and racks for test tubes, large steel tanks of liquid nitrogen, and central to the main room I’m in, a long metal table that Fielding probably was using for shipping, and several chairs, one of them pulled out a little, as if someone might have been sitting in it. I look at the chair first, and I look for blood, but I don’t see any.