“A hammer, yes. But what house doesn’t have a hammer? And the tool marks don’t match. But you know that from lab reports. No nails like the
ones that killed him. Those weren’t found at the family’s home, and no nail gun,” Benton says.
“These were L-head nails, typically used in flooring.”
“According to the police, no nails like that were found at the residence,” he repeats.
“Iron, not stainless steel.” I continue with details from photographs, from lab reports, and all the while I hear myself, I’m aware that I’m going over
the case with Benton as if it’s mine. As if it’s his. As if we are working it the way we used to work cases in our early days together. “With traces of
rust despite their protective zinc coating, which suggests they weren’t just purchased,” I go on. “That maybe they’d been lying around somewhere
and exposed to moisture, possibly saltwater.”
“Nothing like that at the scene. No L-head flooring nails, no iron nails at all,” Benton says. “The father’s been spreading the rumor about a nail
gun, at least publicly.”
“Publicly. Meaning he told the media,” I assume.
“Yes.”
“But when? He told the media when? That’s the important question. Where did the rumor come from and when? Do we know for a fact it
started with the father, because if it did, that’s significant. It could mean he’s offering an alibi, suggesting a weapon he doesn’t have, that’s he trying
to lead the police in the wrong direction.”
“We’re thinking the same thing,” Benton says. “Mr. Bishop might have suggested it to the media, but the question is, did someone suggest it to
him first?”
I detect more subtleties. It occurs to me that Benton knows how the rumor about a nail gun started. He knows who started it, and it’s not difficult
to guess what he’s implying. Jack Fielding is trying to influence what people think about this case. Maybe Fielding is the one behind the rumor that
is now all over the news.
“We should do a retrospective. I’m trying to remember the name of the Salem detective.” There’s so much to do, so much I’ve missed. I hardly
know where to start.
“Saint Hilaire. First name James.”
“Don’t know him.” I’m a stranger to my own life.
“He’s convinced of Johnny Donahue’s guilt, and I’m really concerned it’s just a matter of time before he’s charged with first-degree murder. We
have to move fast. When Saint Hilaire reads what Mrs. Donahue just wrote to you, it will be worse. He’ll be more convinced. We have to do
something quickly,” Benton says. “I’m not supposed to give a damn, but I do because Johnny didn’t do it and no jury is going to like him. He’s
inappropriate. He misreads people, and they misread him. They think he’s callous and arrogant. He laughs and giggles when something isn’t funny.
He’s rude and blunt and has no idea. The whole thing is absurd. A travesty. Probably one of the most classic examples of false confessions I’ve
ever seen.”
“Then why is he still on a locked unit at McLean?”
“He needs psychiatric treatment, but no, he shouldn’t be locked up on a unit with psychotic patients. That’s my opinion, but no one’s listening.
Maybe you can talk to Renaud and Saint Hilaire and they’ll listen to you. We’ll go to Salem and review the case with them. While we’re there, we’ll
look around.”
“And Johnny’s breakdown?” I ask. “If his mother is to be believed, he was fine his first three years at Harvard and suddenly has to be
hospitalized? He’s how old?”
“Eighteen. He returned to Harvard last fall to begin his senior year and was noticeably altered,” Benton said. “Aggressive verbally and sexually,
and increasingly agitated and paranoid. Disordered thinking and distorted perceptions. Symptoms similar to schizophrenia.”
“Drugs?”
“No evidence whatsoever. Submitted to testing when he confessed to the murder and was negative; even his hair was negative for drugs, for
alcohol. His grad-school friend Dawn Kincaid is at MIT, and she and Johnny were working together on a project. She became so concerned about
him she finally called his family. This was in December. Then a week ago, Johnny was admitted to McLean with a stab wound to his hand and told
his psychiatrist that he’d murdered Mark Bishop, claiming he took the train to Salem and had a nail gun in a backpack, said he needed a human
sacrifice to rid him of an evil entity that had taken over his life.”
“Why nails? Why not some other weapon?”
“Something to do with the magical powers of iron. And most of this has been in the news.”
I recall seeing something on the Internet about devil’s bone, and I mention that.
“Exactly. What iron was called in ancient Egypt,” Benton replies. “They sell devil’s bone in some of the shops in Salem.”
“Lashed together in an X that you carry in a red satin pouch. I’ve seen them in some of the witcheries. But not the same type of nails. The ones
in the witcheries are more like spikes, are supposed to look antique. And I doubt they’re treated with zinc, that they’re galvanized.”
“Supposedly, iron protects against malevolent spirits, and thus the explanation for Johnny using iron nails. That’s his explanation. And his
story’s completely unoriginal; as you just pointed out, it was one of the theories all over the news the days before he confessed to the murder.”
Benton pauses, then adds, “Your own office has suggested black magic as a motive, presumably because of the Salem connection.”
“It’s not our job to offer theories. Our job is to be impartial and objective, so I don’t know what you mean when you say we suggested such a
thing.”
“I’m just telling you it’s been discussed.”
“With whom?” But I know.
“Jack’s always been a loose cannon. But he seems to have lost what little impulse control he had,” Benton says.
“I think we’ve established that Jack is a problem I can no longer attempt to solve. What project?” I go back to what Benton mentioned about
Johnny Donahue’s female MIT friend. “And what’s Johnny’s major?”
“Computer science. Since early last summer, he was interning at Otwahl Technologies in Cambridge. As his mother pointed out, he’s unusually
gifted in some areas….”
“Doing what? What was he doing there?” I envision the solid facade of precast rising up like the Hoover Dam not far from where we just drove
past, the part of Cambridge where the SUV with xenon lights was following us before it vanished.
“Software engineering for UGVs and related technologies,” Benton says, as if it is no great matter because he doesn’t know what I do about
UGVs.
Unmanned ground vehicles. Military robots like the prototype MORT in the dead man’s apartment.
“What’s going on here, Benton?” I say with feeling. “What in God’s name is going on?”
7
The storm has settled in, the wind much calmer now, and the snow is already several inches deep. Traffic is steady on Memorial Drive, the weather
of little consequence to people used to New England winters.
The rooftops of MIT fraternity houses and playing fields are solid white on the left side of the road, and on the other side the snow drifts like
smoke over the bike path and the boathouse and vanishes into the icy blackness of the Charles. Farther east, where the river empties into the
harbor, the Boston skyline is ghostly rectangular shapes and smudges of light in the milky night, and there is no air traffic over Logan, not a single
plane in sight.
“We should meet with Renaud as soon as possible—the sooner, the better.” Benton thinks Essex County District Attorney Paul Renaud should
know that there may be something more to Johnny Donahue’s confession, that somehow the Harvard senior and a dead man in my cooler could be
connected. “But if this involves DARPA?” Benton adds.
“Otwahl gets DARPA funding. But it isn’t DARPA, isn’t DoD. It’s civilian, an international private industry,” I reply. “But certainly it’s closely tied
to government through substantial grants, tens of millions, maybe a lot more than that, since their rather clumsy invention of MORT.”
“The question is what else they’re focused on. What are they focused on now that could have significance in all this?”
“I honestly can’t say, not for a fact. But you know the obvious just by looking at the place.” Were we to drive back toward Hanscom, we would
pass within a mile of Otwahl Technologies and its adjoining superconducting test facility, a massive self-contained complex with its own private
police force. “Neutron science, most likely, because of materials science and how it applies to new technologies.”
“Robotics,” Benton says.
“Robots, nanotechnology, software engineering, synthetic biology. Lucy knows something about it.”
“Probably more than something.”
“Knowing her, yes. A lot more than something.”
“They’re probably making damn humanoids so we never run out of soldiers.”
“They might be.” I’m not joking.
“And Briggs would know about the robot in this guy’s apartment.” Benton means the dead man’s apartment. “Because of video clips? What
else about that? I wonder if he said something to Jack about it, called and alerted him by asking questions.”
I explain it further, giving a more detailed account of the man and the recordings Lucy discovered—recordings that Marino it appropriately emailed
to Briggs before I had a chance to review them first, and when I did get a chance to see them, it was only superficially, en route to the Civil
Air Terminal in Dover. I tell Benton all about the ill-fated six-legged robot, the Mortuary Operational Removal Transport, known as MORT, that is
parked inside the apartment near the door, and I remind him of the controversies, of the disagreements I had with certain politicians and especially
with Briggs over using a machine to recover casualties in theater or anywhere.
I describe the heartlessness, the horror, of a gas-powered metal construction that sounded like a chain saw lurching across the earth to
recover wounded or dead human beings by grasping them in grippers that looked like the mandibles of a bull ant. “Think of the message it sends if
you’re dying on the battlefield and this is what your comrades send for you,” I say to Benton. “What kind of message does it send to the victim’s
loved ones if they see it on the news?”
“You used inflammatory language like that when you testified before a defense appropriations Senate subcommittee,” Benton assumes.
“I don’t remember what I said verbatim.”
“I’m sure you didn’t make any friends at Otwahl. You probably made enemies you have no idea about.”
“It wasn’t about Otwahl or any other technology company. All Otwahl did was create an unmanned robotic vehicle. It was people at the
Pentagon that came up with its so-called useful purpose. I think originally MORT was supposed to be a packbot, nothing more. I didn’t even
remember Otwahl was the company until tonight. They were never a preoccupation of mine. My disagreement was with the Pentagon, and I was
going to stand my ground.” I almost say this time. But I catch myself. Benton doesn’t know about the time I didn’t stand my ground.
“Enemies who haven’t forgotten. Those kinds of enemies never forget. I’m sorry I wasn’t privy to all this when it was going on,” Benton says,
because he wasn’t around when I was making enemies on Capitol Hill. He was in a protective witness program and not exactly in a position to give
me advice or counsel or even assure me that he wasn’t dead. “You must have files on it, records from back then.”
“Why?”
“I’d like to take a look, get up to speed. It might explain a few things.”
“What things?”
“I’d like to look at what you have from back then,” Benton says. Transcripts from my testimony, video recordings of the segments aired on CSPAN:
What I have would be in my safe in our Cambridge basement—along with certain items I don’t want him to see. A thick gray accordion file
and photographs I took with my own camera. Bloodstained squares of white cardboard improvised before the day of FTA DNA collection kits,
because if blood is air-dried it can last forever, and I knew where technology was headed. Plain white envelopes with fingernail cuttings and pubic
combings and head hair. Oral, anal, and vaginal swabs, and cut and torn bloody underpants. An empty Chablis bottle, a beer can. Materials I
smuggled from a dark continent half a world away more than two decades ago, evidence I shouldn’t have had, items I shouldn’t have had privately
tested, but I did. I seriously consider that if Benton was aware of the Cape Town cases, he might not feel the same about me.
“You know the old saying, revenge is best served cold,” he goes on. “You fucked a huge multimillion-dollar project, a joint venture between DoD
and Otwahl Technologies, and stepped on toes, and although a number of years have passed, I suspect there are people out there who haven’t
forgotten, even if you have. And now here you are, working with DoD in Otwahl’s backyard. A perfect opportunity to calculate revenge, to pay you
back.”
“Pay me back? A man dropping dead in Norton’s Woods is payback?”
“I just think we should know the cast of characters.”
Then we stop talking about it, because we have reached the girder bridge that connects Cambridge to Boston, the Mass Ave Bridge, or what
the locals refer to as the Harvard Bridge or MIT Bridge, depending on their loyalties. Just ahead, my headquarters rises like a lighthouse, siloshaped
with a glass dome on top, seven stories sided in titanium and reinforced with steel. The first time Marino saw the CFC he decided it looked
like a dum-dum bullet, and in the snowy dark, I suppose it does.
Turning off Memorial Drive, away from the river, we take the first left into the parking area, illuminated by solar security lights and surrounded by
a black PVC-coated fence that can’t be climbed or cut. I dig a remote control out of my bag and push a button to open the tall gate, and we drive
over tire tracks that are almost completely covered in fresh white powder. Anne and Ollie’s cars are here, parked near the CFC’s all-wheel-drive
cargo vans and SUVs, and I notice one is missing, one of the SUVs. There should be four, but one of them is gone and has been since before it
began to snow, probably the on-call medicolegal investigator.
I wonder who is on duty tonight and why that person is out in one of our vehicles. At a scene, or is the person at home, and I look around as if
I’ve never been here before. Above the fence on two sides are lab buildings that belong to MIT, glass and brick, with antennas and radar dishes on
the roofs, the windows dark except for a random few glowing dimly, as if someone left a desk light or a lamp on. Snow streaks the night and is loud
like a brittle rain as Benton pulls close to my building, into the space designated for the director, next to Fielding’s spot, which is empty and smooth
