with snow.
“We could put it in the bay,” Benton says hopefully.
“That would be a little spoiled, since no one else can,” I reply. “And it’s unauthorized, anyway. For pickups and deliveries only.”
“Dover’s worn off on you. Am I going to have to salute?”
“Only at home.”
We climb out, and the snow is up to the ankles of my boots and doesn’t pack under them because it is too cold, the flakes tiny and icy. I enter a
code in a keypad next to a shut bay door that begins to retract loudly as Marino and Lucy drive into the lot. The receiving bay looks like a small
hangar sealed with white epoxy paint, and mounted in the ceiling is a monorail crane, a motorized lifter for moving bodies too large for manual
handling. There is a ramp inside leading to a metal door, and parked off to the side is our white van-body truck, what at Dover we refer to as a
bread truck, designed to transport up to six bodies on stretchers or in transfer cases and to serve as a mobile crime scene lab when needed.
As I wait for Marino and Lucy, I’m reminded I’m not dressed for New England. My tactical jacket was perfectly adequate in Delaware, but now
I’m thoroughly chilled. I try not to think about how good it would be to sit in front of the fire with a single-malt Scotch or small-batch bourbon, to catch
up with Benton about things other than tragedy and betrayal and enemies with long memories, to get away from everyone. I want to drink and talk
honestly with my husband, to put aside games and subterfuge and not wonder what he knows. I crave a normal time with him, but we don’t know
what that is. Even when we make love we have our secrets and nothing is normal.
“No updates except Lawless.” Marino answers a question no one asked as the bay door clanks down behind us. “He e-mailed scene
photographs—finally. But says no luck with the dog. No one’s called to report a lost greyhound.”
“What greyhound?” Benton asks.
I was too busy describing MORT and didn’t mention much else I saw on the video clips. I feel foolish. “Norton’s Woods,” I reply. “A black-andwhite
greyhound named Sock that apparently ran off while the EMTs were busy with our case.”
“How do you know his name is Sock?”
I explain it to him as I hold my thumb over the glass sensor of the biometric lock so it can scan my fingerprint. Opening the door that leads into
the lower level of the building, I mention that the dog might have a microchip that could supply useful information about the owner’s identification.
Some rescue groups automatically microchip former racing greyhounds before putting them up for adoption, I add.
“That’s interesting,” Benton says. “I think I saw them.”
“He stared right at you as you were pulling out of the driveway in your sports car about three-fifteen yesterday afternoon,” Lucy tells him as we
enter the processing area, an open space with a security office, a digital floor scale, and a wall of massive stainless-steel doors that open into
cooler rooms and a walk-in freezer.
“What are you talking about?” Benton asks my niece.
“All that time in the car driving through a blizzard and you didn’t catch him up on things?” Lucy says to me, and she’s not easy to be around
when she gets like this.
I feel a prick of annoyance even though she’s right. She knows you, too, enters my mind. She knows you just as well as you know her. She
knows damn well when something is bothering me that I stubbornly keep to myself, and I’ve been bothered and feeling stubborn since I left Dover. It
was stupid of me not to go into the sort of detail that Benton can do something with. I don’t know of anyone more psychologically astute, and he
would have plenty to say about the minutiae picked up by the recorders concealed inside the dead man’s headphones.
Instead, I obsessed about DARPA because I was really obsessing about Briggs. I can’t get past what happened earlier today, about what
happened decades ago, about how what he caused never seems to end. He knows about that dark place in my past, a place I take no one, and a
part of me will never forgive him for creating that place. It was his idea for me to go to Cape Town. It was his goddamn brilliant plan.
“He and the greyhound walked right past your driveway just minutes before he died,” Lucy is telling Benton, but her gaze is steady on me. “If
you hadn’t left, you would have heard the sirens. You probably would have headed over there to see what was going on and maybe would have
some useful information for us.”
She looks at me as if she is looking at the dark place. It’s not possible she could know about it, I reassure myself. I’ve never told her, never told
Benton or Marino or anyone. The documents were destroyed except for what I have. Briggs promised that decades ago when I left the AFIP and
moved to Virginia, and I already knew reports were missing without being told. Lucy doesn’t have the combination to my safe, I remind myself.
Benton doesn’t. No one does.
“If you drop by my lab,” Lucy is saying to Benton, “I’ll show the video clips to you.”
“You haven’t seen them,” I say to Benton, because I’m not sure. He’s acting as if he hasn’t seen them, but I don’t know if it’s just more of the
same, more secrets.
“I haven’t,” he answers, and it sounds like the truth. “But I want to, and I will.”
“Weird you’re in them,” Lucy says to him. “Your house is in them. Really weird. Sort of freaked me out when I saw it.”
The night security guard sits behind his glass window, and he nods at us but doesn’t get up from his desk. His name is Ron, a big, muscular
dark-skinned man with closely shorn hair and unfriendly eyes. He seems afraid of me or skeptical, and it’s obvious he’s been instructed to maintain
his post, not to be sociable, no matter who it is. I can only imagine the stories he’s heard, and Fielding enters my thoughts again. What has
happened to him? What trouble has he caused? How much has he hurt this place?
I walk over to the security guard’s window and check the sign-in log. Since three p.m., three bodies have come in: a motor-vehicle fatality, a
gunshot homicide, and an asphyxiation by plastic bag that is undetermined.
“Is Dr. Fielding here?” I ask Ron.
Retired marine corps military police, he is always neat and proud in his midnight-blue uniform with American flag and AFME patches on the
shoulders and a brass CFC security shield pinned to his shirt. His face is wary and not the least bit warm behind his glass partition as he answers
that he hasn’t seen Fielding. He tells me that Anne and Ollie are here but no one else. Not even the on-call death investigator is in. Janelle, he
informs me in a monotone, and every other word is ma’am, and I’m reminded of how cold and condescending ma’am this and ma’am that can
sound and how tired I got of hearing it at Dover. Janelle is working from home because of the weather, Ron reports. Apparently, Fielding told her
that was okay, even though it’s not. That is against the rules I established. On-call investigators don’t work from home.
“We’ll be in the x-ray room,” I inform Ron. “If anybody else shows up, you can find us in there. But unless it’s Dr. Fielding, I need to know who it
is and give clearance. Actually, I probably should know if Dr. Fielding shows up, too. You know what, no matter who it is, I need to know.”
“If Dr. Fielding comes in you want me to call, ma’am. To alert you,” Ron repeats, as if he’s not sure that’s what I meant, or maybe he’s arguing.
“Affirmative,” I make myself clear. “No one should just walk in, doesn’t matter if they work here. Until I tell you otherwise. I want everything airtight
right now.”
“I understand, ma’am.”
“Any calls from the media? Any sign of them?”
“I keep looking, ma’am.” Mounted on three walls are monitors, each split into quadrants that are constantly rotating images picked up by
security cameras outside the building and in strategic areas such as the bays, corridors, elevators, lobby, and all doors leading into the building. “I
know there’s some concern about the man found in the park.” Ron looks past me at Marino, as if the two of them have an understanding.
“Well, you know where we’ll be for now.” I open another door. “Thank you.”
A long white hallway with a gray tile floor leads to a series of rooms located in a logical order that facilitates the flow of our work. The first stop
is ID, where bodies are photographed and fingerprinted and personal effects not taken by the police are removed and secured in lockers. Next is
large-scale x-ray, which includes the CT scanner, and beyond that are the autopsy room, the soiled room, the anteroom, the changing rooms, the
locker rooms, the anthropology lab, the Bio4 containment lab reserved for suspected infectious or contaminated cases. The corridor wraps around
in a circle that ends where it began, at the receiving bay.
“What does security know about our patient from Norton’s Woods?” I ask Marino. “Why does Ron think there’s a concern?”
“I didn’t tell him anything.”
“I’m asking what he knows.”
“He wasn’t on duty when we left earlier. I haven’t seen him today.”
“I’m wondering what he’s been told,” I repeat patiently, because I don’t want to squabble with Marino in front of the others. “Obviously, this is a
very sensitive situation.”
“I gave an order before I left that everyone needed to be on the lookout for the media,” Marino says, taking off his leather jacket as we reach the
x-ray room, where the red light above the door indicates that the scanner is in use. Anne and Ollie won’t have started without me, but it’s their habit
to deter people from walking into an area where there are levels of radiation much higher than are safe for living patients. “Wasn’t my idea for
Janelle or the others to work from home, either,” Marino adds.
I don’t ask how long that’s been going on or who the “others” are. Who else has been working from home? This is a state government facility, a
paramilitary installation, not a cottage industry, I feel like saying.
“Damn Fielding,” Marino then mutters. “He’s fucking up everything.”
I don’t answer. Now is not the time to discuss how fucked up everything is.
“You know where I’ll be.” Lucy walks off toward the elevator, and with an elbow pushes a hands-free oversized button. She disappears behind
sliding steel doors as I pass my thumb over another biometric sensor and the lock clicks free.
Inside the control room, forensic radiologist Dr. Oliver Hess is seated at a work station behind lead-lined glass, his gray hair unruly, his face
sleepy, as if I got him out of bed. Past him, through an open door, I can see the eggshell-white Siemens Somatom Sensation and hear the fan of its
water-cooled system. The scanner is a modified version of the one used at Dover, equipped with a custom head holder and safety straps, its wiring
subsurface, its parameter sealed, its table covered by a heavy vinyl slicker to protect the multimillion-dollar system from contaminants such as body
fluids. Slightly angled down toward the door to facilitate sliding bodies on and off, the scanner is in the ready status, and technologist Anne
Mahoney is placing radio-opaque CT skin markers on the dead man from Norton’s Woods. I get a strange feeling as I walk in. He is familiar,
although I’ve never seen him before, only parts of him on recordings I watched on an iPad.
I recognize the tint of his light-brown skin and his tapered hands, which are by his sides on top of a disposable blue sheet, his long, slender
fingers slightly curled and stiff with rigor.
In the video clips I heard his voice and saw glimpses of his hands, his boots, his clothing, but I did not see his face. I’m not sure what I imagined
but am vaguely disturbed by his delicate features and long, curly brown hair, by the spray of light freckles across his smooth cheeks. I pull the sheet
back, and he is very thin, about five-foot-eight and at most one hundred and thirty pounds, I deduce, with very little body hair. He could easily pass
for sixteen, and I’m reminded of Johnny Donahue, who isn’t much older. Kids. Could that be a common denominator? Or is it Otwahl Technologies?
“Anything?” I ask Anne, a plain-looking woman in her thirties with shaggy brown hair and sensitive hazel eyes. She’s probably the best person
on my staff, can do anything, whether it is different types of radiographic imaging or helping in the morgue or at crime scenes. She is always willing.
“This. Which I noticed when I undressed him.” Her latex-sheathed hands grip the body at the waist and hip, pulling it over so I can see a tiny
defect on the left side of the back at the level of the kidneys. “Obviously missed at the scene because it didn’t bleed out, at least not much. You
know about his bleeding, which I witnessed with my own two eyes when I was going to scan him early this morning? That he bled profusely from his
nose and mouth after he was bagged and transported?”
“That’s why I’m here.” I open a drawer to retrieve a hand lens, and then Benton is by my side in a surgical mask and gown and gloves. “He’s got
some sort of injury,” I say to him as I lean close to the body and magnify an irregular wound that looks like a small buttonhole. “Definitely not a
gunshot entrance. A stab wound made by a very narrow blade, like a boning knife but with two edges. Something like a stiletto.”
“A stiletto in his back would drop him in his tracks?” Benton’s eyes are skeptical above his mask.
“No. Not unless he was stabbed at the base of his skull and it severed his spinal cord.” I think of Mark Bishop and the nails that killed him.
“Like I said at Dover, maybe something was injected,” Marino offers as he walks in covered from head to foot with personal protective clothing,
including a face shield and hair cover, as if he’s worried about airborne pathogens or deadly spores, such as anthrax. “Maybe some kind of
anesthesia. A lethal injection, in other words. That could sure as hell drop you in your tracks.”
“In the first place, an anesthesia like sodium thiopental is injected into a vein, as are pancuronium bromide or potassium chloride.” I pull on a
pair of examination gloves. “They aren’t injected into the person’s back. Same thing with mivacurium, with succinylcholine. You want to kill
somebody decisively and quickly with a neuromuscular blocker, you’d better inject it intravenously.”
“But if they were injected into a muscle, it would still kill you, right?” Marino opens a cabinet and gets out a camera. He rummages in a drawer
and finds a plastic six-inch ruler for size reference. “During executions, sometimes the injection misses the vein and goes into the muscle, and the
inmate still dies.”
“A slow and very painful death,” I reply. “By all accounts, this man’s death wasn’t slow, and this injury wasn’t made by a needle.”
