psychiatrists who doesn’t know any better and can’t seem to remember from one time to the next that, no, wrong again. Lead, iron, nickel, cobalt.
All bullets, pellets, are ferromagnetic, I don’t care if they’re so-called green, they’re going to torque because of the magnetic field. That could be a
problem if someone’s got a fragment in him that’s in close proximity to a blood vessel, an organ. God forbid something was left in the brain if some
poor person was shot in the head eons ago. Paxil, Neurontin, or the like aren’t going to help the poor person’s mood disorder if an old bullet
relocates to the wrong place.”
She rinses a fragment of kidney and places it on the dissecting board.
“We’re going to need to measure how much blood is in the peritoneum.” I’m looking at the hole in the diaphragm that I saw hours earlier when I
followed the wound track during the CT scan. “I’m going to guess at least three hundred MLs, originating through the lacerated diaphragm, and at
least fifty MLs in his pericardium, which normally might suggest some time interval before death because of how much he bled. But the severity of
these injuries, which are similar to blast injuries? He had no survival time. Only as long as it took for his heart and respiration to quit. If I were willing
to use the term instant death, this would qualify as one.”
“This is unusual.” Anne hands me a tiny fragment of kidney that is hard and brown with tan discoloration and retracted edges. “I mean, what is
that? It almost looks fixed or cooked or something.”
There is more. As I pull a light closer and look at the bloc of organs, I notice hard, dry fragments of the left lung’s lower lobe and of the heart’s
left ventricle. Using a steel beaker, I scoop pooled blood and hematoma out of the mediastinum, or the middle section of the chest cavity, and find
more fragments and tiny, hard, irregular blood clots. Looking closely at the disrupted left kidney, I note perirenal hemorrhage and interstitial
emphysema, and more evidence of the same abnormal tissue changes in areas closest to the wound track, areas most susceptible to damage
from a blast. But what blast?
“Reminds me of tissue that’s been frozen, almost freeze-dried,” I say as I label sheets of blotting paper with an abbreviation for the location the
sample came from. LLL for left lower lobe and LK for left kidney and LV for left ventricle of the heart.
In the strong light of a surgical lamp and the magnification of a hand lens I can barely make out dark silvery specks of whatever was blasted
through this man when he was stabbed in the back. I see fibers and other debris that won’t be discernible until they are looked at under a
microscope, but I feel hopeful. Something was deposited that likely was unintended by the perpetrator, trace evidence that might give me
information about the weapon and the person who used it. I turn the fume hood on the lowest setting so there is nothing more than an exchange of
air, and I begin gently blotting.
I touch the sterile paper to the surfaces of fragmented tissue and the edges of wounds, and one by one lay the sheets inside the hood, where
the gently circulating air will facilitate evaporation, the drying of blood without disturbing anything adhering to it. I collect samples of the freeze-driedlooking
tissue and save them in plasticized cartons and also in small jars of formalin, and I tell Anne we’re going to want a lot of photographs and
that I’ll ask colleagues of mine to look at images of internal damage and of the tannish tough tissue. I’ll ask if they’ve ever seen anything like it
before, and as I’m saying all this, I’m wondering who I mean. Not Briggs. I wouldn’t dare send anything to him. Certainly not Fielding. No one who
works here. No one at all comes to mind except Benton and Lucy, whose opinions won’t help or matter. It’s up to me whether I like it or not.
“Let’s turn him over,” I say, and empty of organs, he is light in the torso and head-heavy.
I measure the entrance wound and describe what it looks like and exactly where it is, and I examine the wound track through the bloc of organs,
finding every area that was punctured by what I’m now certain was a narrow double- and single-edged blade.
“If you look at the wound, you can clearly see the two sharp ends of it, the corners of the buttonhole made by two sharp edges,” I explain to
Anne.
“I see.” Her eyes are dubious behind her plastic glasses.
“But look here, where the wound track terminates in the heart. Can you see how both ends of the wound are identical, both very sharp?” I move
the light closer and hand her a magnifying lens.
“Slightly different from the wound on his back,” she says.
“Yes. Because when the blade terminated in the heart muscle, it didn’t penetrate as deeply; just the tip went in. As opposed to when these
other wounds were made.” I show her. “The tip penetrated and was followed by the length of the blade running through, and as you can see, the one
end of the wound is just a little blunted and slightly stretched. You especially can see it here, where it penetrated the left kidney and kept going.”
“I think I see what you’re saying.”
“Not what you would expect with a butterfly knife, a boning knife, a dagger, all of which are double-edged, both sides of the blade sharp from tip
to handle. This brings to mind something spear-tipped—sharp on both sides at the tip but single-edged after that, like I’ve seen in some fighting
knives or, in particular, something like a bowie knife or bayonet, where the top of the blade has been sharpened on both edges to make penetration
easier in stabbings. So what we’ve got is an entrance that is three-eighths of an inch linear; both ends of the wound are sharp with one that is
slightly more blunted than the other. And the width expands to five-eighths of an inch.” I measure, and Anne writes it down on a body diagram.
“So the blade is three-eighths of an inch at the tip, and at its widest it’s five-eighths. That’s pretty narrow. Almost like a stiletto,” she says.
“But a stiletto is double-edged, the entire blade is.”
“Homemade? A blade that injects something that explodes?”
“Without causing thermal injury, without causing burns. In fact, what we’re seeing is more consistent with frostbite, where the tissue feels hard
and is discolored,” I remind her as I measure the distance from the wound on the man’s back to the top of his head. “Twenty-six inches, and two
inches to the left of the mid-spine. Direction is up and anterior, with extensive subcutaneous and tissue emphysema along the track, perforating the
transverse process on the left twelfth rib paraspinally. Perforating paraspinal muscle, perirenal fat, left adrenal, left kidney, diaphragm, left lung, and
pericardium, terminating in the heart.”
“How long a blade for something to perforate all that?”
“At least five inches.”
She plugs in the autopsy saw, and we turn the body on its back again. I place a headrest under the neck and incise the scalp from ear to ear,
following the hairline so the sutures won’t be visible afterward. The top of the skull is white like an egg as I reflect the scalp back and pull the face
down like a sock, like something sad, the features collapsing as if he is crying.
15
Idon’t realize the sun is up and the arctic front has marched off to the south until I open my office door and am greeted by a clear blue sky beyond
tall windows.
I look down seven floors, and there are a few cars moving slowly on the white-frosted furrowed road below, and going the other way, a
snowplow truck with its yellow blade held up like a crab claw as it scuttles along, looking for the right spot, then lowering the blade with a clank I
can’t hear from up here and scraping pavement that’s not going to be completely cleared because of ice.
The riverbank is white, and the Charles is the color of old blue bottle glass and wrinkled by the current, and beyond in the distance the skyline
of Boston catches the early light, the John Hancock Tower soaring far above any other high-rise, overbearing and sturdy, like a solitary column left
standing in the ruins of an ancient temple. I think about coffee, and it is a fleeting urge as I wander into my bathroom and look at the coffeemaker on
the counter by the sink and the boxes of K-Cups that include hazelnut.
I’m beyond being helped by stimulants, not sure I’d feel caffeine except in my gut, which is empty and raw. Intermittently, I’m stabbed by
nausea, then I’m hungry, then nothing at all, just the gauziness of sleeplessness and the persistent hint of a headache that seems more
remembered than real. My eyes burn, and thoughts move thickly but push with force like a heavy surf pounding against the same unyielding
questions and tasks to be done. I won’t wait for anyone, given a choice. I can’t wait. There is no choice. I will overstep boundaries if need be, and
why shouldn’t I? Boundaries I’ve set have been stepped on right and left by others. I will do things myself, those things I know how to do. I am alone,
more alone than I was because I’ve changed. Dover has changed me. I will do what is necessary, and it might not be what people want.
It is half past seven, and I’ve been downstairs all this time because Anne and I took care of other cases after we finished with the Norton’s
Woods man, whose name we are no closer to discovering, or if it is known, I’ve not been informed. I know intimate details about him that should be
none of my business, but not the most important facts: who he is, what he was and hoped to become, his dreams, and what he loved and hated. I sit
down at my desk and check the notes Anne made for me downstairs and add a few of my own, making sure I will remember later he had eaten
something with poppy seeds and yellow cheese shortly before he died and the total amount of blood and clot in the left hemithorax was one
thousand three hundred milliliters and the heart was disrupted into five irregular fragments that were still attached at the level of the valves.
I will want to emphasize this to the prosecution, it occurs to me, because I’m thinking about court. For me it all ends there, at least on the civilian
side of my life. I imagine the prosecutor using inflammatory language I can’t use, telling the jury that the man ate cheese and a poppy-seed bagel
and took his rescued old dog for a walk, that his heart was blown to pieces, causing him to hemorrhage almost three units of blood or more than a
third of all the blood in his body in a matter of minutes. The autopsy didn’t reveal the purpose of the man’s death, although provisionally at least the
cause of it is simple, and I absently write it down as I continue to ponder and meditate and make plans.
Atypical stab/puncture to the left back.
A pathological diagnosis that seems trite after what I just saw, and one that would give me pause, were I to come across it somewhere. I’d find
it cryptic, almost tongue-in-cheek and coy, like a bad joke if one knows the rest of it, the massive blastlike disruption of the organs and that the
death is a vicious and calculated homicide. I envision the hem of the long, black coat quickly flapping past and what must have happened just
seconds before when the person wearing it plunged a blade into the victim’s lower back. For an instant he felt the physical response, the shock and
pain as he exclaimed “Hey… !” and clutched his chest, collapsing on his face on the slate path.
I imagine the person in the black coat quickly bending over to snatch off the man’s black gloves and briskly walking away, perhaps tucking the
blade up a sleeve or into a folded newspaper or I don’t know. But as I imagine it, I believe the person in the long, black coat is the killer and was
covertly recorded by the dead man’s headphones, and it causes me to wonder again who was doing the spying. Did the killer plant micro-recording
devices in the victim’s headphones so he could be followed? And I imagine a figure in a long, black coat walking swiftly through the shaded woods,
coming up behind the victim, who couldn’t hear anything but the music in his headphones as he’s stabbed in the back, and he falls too fast to turn
around. I wonder if he died not knowing who did this to him. And afterward? Is it what Lucy proposed? Did the person in the long, black coat view
the video files and decide it wasn’t necessary to delete them from a webcam site somewhere, that in fact it was clever to leave them?
There are reasons for all things, I tell myself what has always been true but never feels that way while I’m in the middle of the problem. There
are answers, and I will find them, and while the physics of how the fatal injury was executed may seem difficult to divine, I assure myself there are
tracks the killer left behind. I have captured footprints on blotting paper. I will follow them to who did this. You won’t get away with it, I think, as if I’m
talking to the person in the long, black coat. I hope whoever you are, you have nothing to do with me, that you aren’t someone I taught to be
meticulous and clever. I have decided that Jack Fielding is on the run or in custody. It even enters my mind that he might be dead. But I’m
exhausted. I’m sleep-deprived. My thoughts aren’t as disciplined as they should be. He can’t be dead. Why would he be dead? I have seen the
dead downstairs, and he wasn’t among them.
My other patients of the morning were simple enough and asked little of me as I tended to them: a motor-vehicle fatality, and I could smell the
booze and his bladder was full, as if he’d been drinking until the moment he left the bar and climbed behind the wheel in a snowstorm that careened
him into a tree; a shooting in a run-down motel, and the needle tracks and prison tattoos of yet one more among us who died the way he lived; an
asphyxia by a plastic dry-cleaning bag tied around an old widow’s neck with an old red satin ribbon, maybe left over from a holiday during better
times, her stomach full of dissolved white tablets and next to the bed, an empty bottle of a benzodiazepine prescribed for sleeplessness and
anxiety.
I have no messages on my office and cell phones, no e-mails that matter to me at the moment and under the circumstances. When I checked
Lucy’s lab, she wasn’t there, and when I checked with security, I discovered that even Ron has left, replaced by a guard I’ve never met, gangly and
jug-eared like Ichabod Crane, someone named Phil who says Lucy’s car isn’t in the lot and the instructions are that the security guards aren’t to let
anyone into the building, not through the lower level or the lobby, without clearing it with me. Not possible, I let Phil know. Employees should be
