showing up already, or they will be at any minute, and I can’t be the gatekeeper. Let anybody in who has a right to be here, I told him before I came
upstairs. Except Dr. Fielding, and when I added that, I could tell it wasn’t necessary. The guard named Phil clearly was aware that Fielding can’t just
show up or won’t or maybe isn’t able to, and besides, the FBI dominates my parking lot. I can see their SUVs clear as the bright, cold day on the
video display on my desk.
I swivel my chair around to the polished black-granite countertop behind me, to my arsenal of microscopes and what accompanies them.
Pulling on a pair of examination gloves, I slit open one of the white envelopes I sealed with white paper tape right before I came upstairs, and I pull
out a sheet of blotting paper that is stained with a generous smear of dried blood that came from the area of the left kidney where I saw a dense
collection of metallic foreign bodies in the MRI. Turning on the lamp of my materials microscope, a Leica I have depended on for years, I carefully
move the paper to the stage. I tilt the eyetubes to a viewing angle that won’t strain my neck and shoulders, and realize right away that the settings
have been changed for someone much taller than me who is right-handed, someone who drinks coffee with cream and chews spearmint gum, I
suspect. The ocular focus and interocular distance have been changed, too.
Switching to left-hand operation and adjusting the height so it is better suited for me, I start with a magnification of 50X, manipulating the focus
knob with one hand as I use the other to move the sheet of blotting paper on the stage, lining up the bloody smear until I find what I’m looking for,
bright whitish-silver chips and flakes in a constellation of other particles so minute that when I bump the magnification up to 100X, I can’t make out
their characteristics, only the rough edges and scratches and striations on the largest particles, what looks like unburned metal chips and filings that
have been milled by a machine or a tool. Nothing I see reminds me of gunshot residue, doesn’t even remotely resemble the flakes, disks, or balls I
associate with gunpowder or the ragged fragments or particulate of a projectile or its jacket.
More curious is other debris mixed with blood and its obvious elements, the colorful confetti of detritus that constitutes everyday dust tangled
with red cells piled up like coins, and granular leukocytes reminiscent of amoeba that are caught as if frozen in time, swimming and cavorting with a
louse and a flea that at a magnified size remind me why seventeenth-century London went into a panic when Robert Hooke published Micrographia
and revealed the piercing mouthparts and claws of what infested cats and mattresses. I recognize fungi and spores that look like sponges and fruit,
spiny pieces of insect legs and insect egg cases that look like the delicate shells of nuts or spherical boxes carved of porous wood. As I move the
paper on the stage, I find more hairy appendages of long-dead monsters, such as midges and mites and the wide compound eyes of a
decapitated ant, the feathery antenna of what may have been a mosquito, the overlapping scales of animal hair, maybe from a horse or a dog or a
rat, and reddish-orange flecks that could be rust.
I reach for the phone and call Benton. When he answers, I hear voices in the background and am subjected to a bad connection.
“A knife sharpened or shaped on something like a lathe, possibly a rusty one in a workshop or basement, possibly an old root cellar where
there are mold, bugs, decaying vegetables, probably damp carpet,” I say right off as I begin an Internet search on my computer, typing the keywords
knife and exploding gases.
“What was sharpened?” Benton asks, and then he says something to someone else, something like need the keys or need to keep. “I’m
moving, not in a good place,” he gets back to me.
“The weapon used to stab him. A lathe, a grinder, possibly old or not taken care of, with traces of rust, based on the metal shavings and very
fine particulate I’m seeing. I think the blade was honed, perhaps to make it thinner and to sharpen the tip on both edges, to turn the tip into a spear,
so whatever might have been used for sharpening and polishing, a rasp, a file.”
“You’re talking about power tools that are old and rusty. A lot of rust?”
“Metalworking tools of some type, not necessarily power tools; I’m not in a position to be that detailed. I’m not an expert in metalworking and I
don’t know how much rust. Just that I found what looks like flakes of it.” Exploding intestines. How to clean your spark plugs. Common gases
associated with metalworking and hand-forged knives, I silently read what is on my computer screen as I then say to Benton, “Not that I pretend to
be a trace-evidence examiner, but microscopically it’s nothing I’ve not seen before, just never seen it blown into a body. But then I’ve never really
looked. I’ve never had a reason to look for something like this, am unaccustomed to using blotting paper internally when someone has been
stabbed. I suppose there could be all sorts of invisible fibers, debris, particulate, injected inside people who’ve been shot, stabbed, impaled, or
God knows what.”
I type injection knife into the search field because as I listen to myself, I’m reminded of remote delivery darts, of weapons powered by CO to fire
what’s basically a long-range immobilization or tranquilizing missile with a small explosive charge and a hypodermic needle. Why couldn’t you do the same thing with a knife, as long as
it had a way to be powered and a narrow channel bored through the blade with an outlet hole near the tip?
“I’m walking outside to the car now,” Benton says. “Will be there in forty-five minutes to an hour if the traffic’s not too bad. The roads aren’t bad.
One-twenty-eight isn’t too bad.”
“Well, this wasn’t hard.” I’m disappointed. Nothing with so much potential for lethal damage should be this easy to find.
“What isn’t hard?” Benton says as I look in amazement at an image of a steel combat knife with a gas outlet hole near the tip and a neoprene
handle in a foam-lined plastic case.
“A CO cartridge screws into the handle….” I skim out loud. “Thrust the five-inch stainless-steel blade into the target as you use your thumb to push the release button, which it
appears is part of the guard hub….”
“Kay? Who’s with you right now?”
“Injects a freezing ball of gas the size of a basketball or more than forty cubic inches at eight hundred pounds of pressure per square inch,” I go
on, looking at images on an elaborate website as I wonder how many people have such a weapon in their homes, their cars, their camping gear, or
are walking around with it strapped to their sides. I have to admit it is ingenious, possibly one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen. “Can drop a
large mammal in a single stab…”
“Kay, are you by yourself?”
“Freezes wound tissue instantly, thus delaying bleeding and attracting other predators, so if you have to defend yourself against a great white
shark, for example, it won’t begin bleeding into the water and attracting other sharks until you are well out of the way.” I skim and summarize and
shark, for example, it won’t begin bleeding into the water and attracting other sharks until you are well out of the way.” I skim and summarize and
feel sickened. “It’s called a WASP. You can add it into your shopping cart for less than four hundred dollars.”
“Let’s talk about it when I see you,” Benton says over the phone.
“I’ve never heard of it.” I read more about a compressed gas injection knife I can order right now as long as I’m over eighteen years of age.
“Advertised for Special Ops, SWAT, pilots who are stranded in open water, scuba divers. Apparently developed to kill large marine predators—as I
said, sharks, mammals, maybe whales and those in wet suits….”
“Kay?”
“Or grizzly bears, for example, while you’re minding your own business on a friendly hike through the mountains.” I make no effort to keep the
sarcasm out of my tone, to hide the anger I feel. “And, of course, military, but nothing I’ve seen in military casualties—”
“I’m on a cell phone,” Benton interrupts me. “I’d rather you don’t mention this to anyone else. No one in your office, or have you already?”
“I haven’t already.”
“You’re by yourself?” he asks me again.
Why wouldn’t I be? But I say, “Yes.”
“And maybe you could delete it from your history, empty your cache, in case anybody decides to view your recent searches.”
“I can’t stop Lucy from doing that.”
“I don’t care if Lucy does it.”
“She’s not here. I don’t know where she went.”
“I know,” he says.
“All right, then.” He’s not going to tell me where she is or where anybody is, it seems. “I’ll make evidence rounds, take care of as much as I can
and meet you downstairs in back when you get here.” I hang up and try to reason through what just happened. I try not to feel hurt by him as I logically
sort it out.
Benton didn’t sound surprised or especially concerned. He didn’t seem alarmed by what I’ve discovered but by my discovering it and the
possibility that I might have told someone else, and that probably means the same thing I’ve been sensing since I returned home from Dover.
Maybe I’m not the one finding things out. Maybe I’m simply the last one to know and nobody wants me to find out anything. What an unexpected
predicament to be in, if not an unprecedented one, I think, as I do what Benton asked and empty the cache and clear the history, making it
problematic for anyone to see what I’ve been searching on the Internet. As I do this I wonder who really asked: My husband, or was it the FBI
asking? Who was just talking to me and telling me what to do as if I don’t know better?
It’s almost nine, and most of my staff is already here, those who aren’t using the snow as an excuse to stay home or to go somewhere else
they’d rather be, such as skiing in Vermont. On the security monitor I’ve watched cars pull into the lot and seen some people coming through the
back door but far more arriving by way of the civilized entrance on the ground floor, through the stone lobby with its formidable carvings and flags,
avoiding the dreary domain of the dead on the lower level. The scientists rarely need to meet the patients whose body fluids and belongings and
other evidence they test, and then I hear the sounds of my administrator, Bryce, unlocking the door in the hallway that opens onto his adjoining
office.
I reseal the blotting paper in a clean envelope and unlock a drawer to gather other items I’ve been keeping safe as I try not to sink into a dark
space, thinking dark thoughts about what I just looked at on a website and what it implies about human beings and their capacity to create
imaginative ways to do harm to other creatures. In the name of survival, it crosses my mind, but then rarely is it really about staying alive; instead,
it’s about making sure something else doesn’t, and the power people feel when they can overpower, maim, kill. How terrible, how awful, and I have
no doubt about what happened to the man from Norton’s Woods, that someone came up behind him and stabbed him with an injection knife,
blasting a ball of compressed gas into his vital organs, and if it was CO, there is no test that will tell us. Carbon dioxide is ubiquitous, literally as present as the air we
exhale, and I envision what I saw on CT, the dark pockets of air that had been blown into the chest and what that must have felt like and how I will answer the same question I’m always
asked.
Did he suffer?
The truthful answer would be no one knows such a thing except the person who is dead, but I would say no, he didn’t suffer. I would say he felt it.
He felt something catastrophic happening to him. He wasn’t conscious long enough to suffer during the agonal last moments of his life, but he would
have felt a punch to his lower back accompanied by tremendous pressure in his chest as his organs ruptured, all of it happening at once. That
would have been the last thing he felt except possibly a glimmer, a flash, of a panicked thought that he was about to die, and then I stop thinking
about it because to obsess and imagine further would become useless and self-indulgent theorizing that is paralyzing and nonproductive. I can’t
help him if I’m upset.
I’m worthless to anyone if I feel what I feel, just as it was when I took care of my father and became an expert at pushing down emotions that
climbed up inside me like some desperate creature trying to get out. “I worry what you have learned, my little Katie,” my father said to me when I
was twelve and he was a skeleton in the back bedroom, where the air was always too warm and smelled like sickness and light seeped wanly
through the slatted shades I kept closed most of the way his last months. “You have learned things you shouldn’t ever have to learn but especially at
your age, my little Katie,” he said to me as I made the bed with him still in it, having learned to wash him religiously so he wasn’t overcome by
pressure sores, to change his soiled sheets by moving his body, a body that seemed hollowed out and dead except for the heat of his fever.
I would gently rock my father to his side, holding him up on one side, then the other, leaning him against me because he could not get up in the
end, couldn’t even sit up. He was too weak to help me move him during what his doctor called the blast phase of chronic myeloid leukemia, and at
times he enters my mind and I feel the weight of him against me when I’m swathed in protective clothing, peering through protective glasses, at
work at my hard steel table.
I fill out lab analysis requests that will need to be signed by each scientist I receipt various items to so I can keep the chain of evidence intact.
Then I get up from my desk.
16
Knocking once, I open the door that leads into Bryce’s office.
Our shared entrance is directly across from the door to my private bath, which I’ve learned to keep open a crack. When both metal gray doors
are shut I have had a tendency to get mixed up and walk in on Bryce when I’m interested in coffee or washing up or I find myself about to hand
paperwork to a toilet and a sink. He is at his desk with his chair rolled back and has taken off his coat, which is draped over the back, but he still
has on his big designer sunglasses that look ridiculously heavy, as if drawn on with a dark-brown crayon. He struggles with a pair of L.L.Bean snow
boots that don’t go with his typically deliberate ensemble, which today is a navy cashmere blazer, tight black jeans, a black turtleneck, and a tooled
