“I don’t mean to state what’s as plain as the nose on my face, but there’s not much you really know about what goes on,” Lucy says. “You don’t
know the finer points of the day-to-day in this place. How could you?” She returns to her side of the desk and picks up her coffee, but she doesn’t sit
back down. “You haven’t been here. You’ve sort of never been here since we opened for business.”
“This is it? This is the entire log for yesterday?”
“Yup. Janelle came in at four. If what she entered into the log is to be believed.” Lucy stands and drinks her coffee, eyeing me. “And she runs
with quite a pack, by the way. Forensic fuck buddies. Most of them cops, a few of them data-entry and clerical. Whoever she can be a hero to. You
know she’s on a dodgeball team? What kind of person plays dodgeball? Someone with finesse.”
“If she came in at four, why is she dressed in scene clothes, including her jacket? As if she just came in from the cold?”
“Like I said, if what she entered in the log is to be believed.”
“And David was on before that and didn’t respond to anything, either?” I ask. “Jack could have sent him to Norton’s Woods. David was sitting
right here, so why didn’t Jack tell him to go to the scene? It’s maybe fifteen minutes from here.”
“And you don’t know that, either.” Lucy walks into the bathroom and rinses her mug. “You don’t know if David was sitting right here,” she says
as she walks back out and hovers near my closed office door. “I don’t want to be the one to tell you….”
“It would seem you are the only one to tell me. No one else is telling me a damn thing,” I reply. “What the hell is happening around here? People
just show up when they feel like it?”
“Pretty much. The other MEs, the MLIs, in and out, marching to their own drummer. It trickles down from the top.”
“It trickles down from Jack.”
“At least on your side of things. The labs are another story, because he’s not interested in them. Except firearms.” She leans against the closed
door, slipping her hands into the pockets of her lab coat.
“He’s supposed to be in charge in my absence. Jack’s the co-director of the entire CFC-Port Mortuary.” I can’t keep the protest out of my tone,
the note of outrage.
“Not interested in the labs, and scientists don’t pay any attention to him, anyway. Except firearms, like I said. You know Fielding and guns,
knives, crossbows, hunting bows. Never met a weapon he didn’t love. So he messes with the firearms and tool-mark lab and has managed to fuck
them up, too. Piss off Morrow until he’s on the verge of quitting. I do know he’s actively looking for another job, and there’s no good reason his lab
didn’t finish with the Glock the dead guy had on him. The eradicated serial number. Shit. He bolted out of here this morning and didn’t bother.”
“He bolted out of here?”
“He was driving off when I was returning from Norton’s Woods. This was about ten-thirty.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“No. Maybe he wasn’t feeling well. I don’t know, but I don’t understand why he didn’t make sure someone took care of the Glock. Using acid on
a drilled-off serial number? How long does that take to at least try? He must have known it was important.”
“He might not have,” I answer. “If the Cambridge detective is the only one who talked to him, why would he think the Glock was important? At
that time, no one had a clue the man from Norton’s Woods is a homicide.”
“Well, I guess that’s a relevant point. Morrow probably doesn’t even know we went to get you, that you’re back from Dover. Fielding vanished,
too, when he knew damn well there was a major problem that most people with a brain in their head would decide was his fault. He’s the one who
took the call about the guy in Norton’s Woods. He’s the one who didn’t go to the scene or make sure somebody did. The reason Janelle is dressed
for the great outdoors, in my opinion? She didn’t get here at four, the time she entered into the log. She got here just in time to let in the attendants
and sign in the body and then turned right around and left. I can find out. There will be an entry for when she disabled the alarm to enter the building.
Depends on whether you want to make a federal case out of it.”
“I’m surprised Marino hasn’t made sure I know the extent of the problems.” It’s all I can think to say. The inside of my head has gone dark.
“Like the boy crying wolf,” Lucy says, and it’s true.
Marino complains so much about so many people, I scarcely hear him. Now we’re back to my failures. I haven’t paid attention. I haven’t
listened. Maybe I wouldn’t have listened no matter who told me.
“I’ve got a few things to take care of. You know how to find me,” Lucy says, and she opens my door and leaves it open after she walks out.
I pick up the phone and try Fielding’s numbers again. I don’t leave any messages this time, and it crosses my mind that his wife isn’t answering
their home phone, either. She would see my office name and number on caller ID. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t pick up, because she knows it’s
me. Or maybe his family has gone somewhere, is out of town. On a Monday night in the middle of a snowstorm, when he knows damn well I’ve
rushed home from Dover to take care of an emergency case?
I walk out and scan my thumb to unlock the door to the right of mine. I stand inside my deputy chief’s office and slowly scan it as if it is a crime
scene.
11
I picked his office, insisting on one as nice as mine, generously large, with a private shower. He has a river and city view, although his shades are
down, which I find unnerving. He must have closed them when it was still light out, and I don’t know why he would do that. Not for a good reason, I
think. Whatever Jack Fielding has done, it all bodes badly.
I walk around and open each shade, and through expansive glass that is a reflective gray tint, I can make out the blurred lights of downtown
Boston and billowing waves of freezing moisture, an icy snow that clicks and bites like teeth. The tops of high-rises, the Prudential and Hancock
towers are obscured, and gusting wind moans in low tones around the dome over my head. Below, Memorial Drive is churned up by traffic, even at
this hour, and the Charles is formless and black. I wonder how deep the snow is by now and how deep it will get before it moves off to the south. I
wonder if Fielding will ever return to this room I designed and furnished for him, and somehow it feels that he won’t, even though there is no
evidence he’s gone for good.
The biggest difference between our work spaces is his is crowded with reminders of the occupant, his various degrees, certificates, and
commendations, his collectibles on shelves, autographed baseballs and bats, tae kwon do trophies and plaques, and models of fighter planes and
a piece from a real one that crashed. I go over to his desk and survey Civil War relics: a belt buckle, a mess kit, a powder horn, a few minie balls
that I remember him collecting during our early days in Virginia. But there are no photo graphs, and that makes me sad. In some places I can see
what’s gone in blank spaces of wall where he’s not bothered to fill in the tiny holes left from hanging hooks he removed.
It stings that he no longer displays familiar pictures taken when he was my forensic pathology fellow, candid shots of us in the morgue or the
two of us out at death scenes with Marino, the lead homicide detective for Richmond PD in the late eighties, the early nineties, when both Fielding
and I were just getting started, although in completely different ways. He was the good-looking doctor beginning his career, while I was shifting mine
into the private sector, transitioning into civilian life and the role of chief, doing my best not to look back. Maybe Fielding isn’t looking back, although
I don’t know why. His old days were good days compared to mine. He didn’t help cover up a crime. He’s never had anything on par with that to hide
from. Not that I know of, but I have to wonder. What do I know anymore?
Not much, except I sense he’s gotten rid of me, maybe gotten rid of all of us. I sense he’s gotten rid of more than he ever has before. It is
something I’m convinced of without knowing exactly why. Certainly his personal property is still here, his Gore-Tex rain suit on a hanger, and his
neoprene hip waders, his dive bag of scuba gear and scene case stowed in a closet, and his collection of police patches and police and military
challenge coins. I remember helping him move into this office. I even helped him arrange his furniture, both of us complaining and laughing and then
griping some more as we moved the desk, then his conference table, then moved them again and again.
“What is this, Laurel and Hardy?” he said. “You going to push a mule up the stairs next?”
“You don’t have stairs.”
“I’m thinking of getting a horse,” he said as we moved the same chairs we’d just moved earlier. “There’s a horse farm about a mile from the
house. I could board the horse there, maybe ride it to work, to crime scenes.”
“I’ll add that to the employee handbook. No horses.”
We joked and teased each other, and he looked good that day—vital and optimistic, his muscles straining against the short sleeves of his
scrubs. He was just incredibly built and healthy-looking then, his face still boyishly handsome, his dark blond hair messy, and he hadn’t shaved for
several days. He was sexy and funny, and I remember the whispers and giggles of some of the female staff as they walked past his open door,
finding excuses to stare at him. Fielding seemed so happy to be here and with me, and I remember both of us placing photographs and
reminiscing about our early days together—photographs that now are gone.
In their place are ones I don’t recall. The pictures are prominently arranged on his shelves and walls, formal poses of him with politicians and
military brass, one with General Briggs and even Captain Avallone, perhaps from the tour Fielding gave her. He looks wooden and bored. In a
photograph of him in tae kwon do white, mid-flight and kicking an imagined enemy, he looks angry. He looks red-faced and hateful. As I study
recent family portraits, I decide he doesn’t look content in them, either, not even when he is holding his two little girls or has his arm around his wife,
Laura, a delicate blonde whose prettiness is eroding, as if a trying existence is mapping its course on her physically, etching lines and furrows into
a topography that once was graceful and smooth.
She is number three for him, and I can trace his decline as I scan his captured moments in chronological order. When he married her, he
looked energetic, with no sign of a rash, and he didn’t have any unseemly bald patches. I pause to admire how amazing he was, shirtless and as
hard-bodied as stone in running shorts, washing his Mustang, a ‘67, cherry red with Le Mans stripes down the center of the hood. Then as recently
as this past fall, the thickening around his middle; the splotchy, flushed skin; the strands of hair combed back and held in place with gel to hide his
alopecia. At a martial-arts competition not even a month ago, he doesn’t look as fit or as spiritually balanced in his grandmaster’s uniform and
black belt. He doesn’t look like someone who finds joy in beautiful form or technique. He doesn’t look like someone who honors other people or has
self-control or respect for anything. He looks dissipated. He looks slightly deranged. He looks perfectly miserable.
Why? I silently ask that earlier photograph of him with his prized car, when he was stunning to behold and seemed carefree and vital, the sort
of man it would be easy to fall in love with or to place in charge or to trust with your life. What changed? What made you so unhappy? What was it
this time? He hates working for me. He hated it the last time, in Watertown, where he didn’t stay long, and now the CFC, and he hates that more,
it’s obvious. This past late summer, when he started looking so bad, is when we finally opened our doors to criminal justice, taking cases. But I
wasn’t even in Massachusetts then, just one weekend over Labor Day. It can’t be my fault. It’s always been my fault. I’ve always blamed myself for
Fielding’s downfalls, and he’s had more of them than I care to count.
I pick him up and he falls again, only harder each time. It gets uglier. It gets bloodier. Again and again. Like a child who can’t walk, and I won’t
accept it until he’s injured beyond fixing. The drama that will always end predictably is the way Benton has described it. Fielding shouldn’t be a
forensic pathologist, and it’s because of me that he is. He would have been better off if he’d never met me in the spring of 1988 when he wasn’t
sure what he wanted in life and I said I know what you should do. Let me show you. Let me teach you. If he’d never come to Richmond, if he’d never
run into me, he might have picked a way to spend his days that would have suited him. His career, his life, would have been about him and not
about me.
That really is the bottom line, that he does the best he can in an environment totally destructive to him and finally can’t take it any longer and
decompensates, disintegrates, and remembers why he is what he is and who shaped him, and then I loom as huge in his wretched life as a
billboard. His answer to these crises is always the same. He vanishes. One day he simply drops off the radar, and what I find in his wake is awful.
Cases he mishandled or neglected. Memos that showed his lack of control and dangerous judgment. Hurtful voicemails he didn’t bother to delete
because he wanted me to hear them. Damaging e-mails and other communications he hoped I’d find. I sit in his chair and start opening drawers. I
don’t have to rummage long.
The file folder isn’t labeled and contains four pages printed at eight-oh-three yesterday morning, February 8, a speech that based on other
information in the header and news section is from the Royal United Services Institute’s website. A centuries old British think tank with satellite
offices strategically located around the world, RUSI is dedicated to advanced innovations in national and international security, and I can’t imagine
Fielding’s interest. I can’t fathom him caring about a keynote address given by Russell Brown, the shadow secretary of state for defense, on his
views about the “defense debate.” I skim the conservative member of Parliament’s not-so-startling comments that it isn’t a given the UK will always
act as part of an alliance and the economic impact of the war is catastrophic. He makes repeated allusions to misinformation methodically
propagated, which is as close as the respectable MP is going to come to outright accusing the United States of orchestrating the invasion of Iraq
