phone as someone loitered outside my closed door at Port Mortuary. The names she called me and what she accused me of were bitter and vile,
but I didn’t really let it get to me in a way that gave power to her words until I found what I did in Fielding’s office. Since then a shadow that is chilled
and dark like a sunless part of the moon is at the back of my thoughts and moods. I don’t know what is being said or decided about me or what has
been resurrected like some cold-blooded thing that never died and now is stirring.
What records have been found, and what has been gone through that I have secretly feared all these years and at the same time forgotten?
Although the truth was always there, like something unseemly out of sight in a closet, something that I never look for but, if reminded, I know it’s not
gone, because it was never thrown out or returned to its rightful owner, which should never have been me. But the ugly matter was handed over as if
it was mine. And it was left hanging. As long as what was done in South Africa stayed hidden in my closet instead of where it belonged, I’d be fine
was the message I got when I returned to Walter Reed after working those two deaths and was thanked for my service to the AFIP, to the air force,
and was free to leave early. Debt paid in full. They had just the position for me in Virginia, where I would prosper as long as I remembered loyalty
and took my dirty laundry with me.
Has it happened again? Has Briggs done the same thing to me again and soon will send me packing? Where this time? Early retirement
crosses my mind. It’s all coming out with more ugliness piled on, and that’s not survivable, I decide, because I don’t know what else to think. Briggs
has told someone, and someone told Julia Gabriel, who has accused me of hatred, prejudice, callousness, dishonesty, and I must remember that
this noxious miasma permeates any decisions I might make right now, that and fatigue. Be exceedingly careful. Use your head. Don’t give
yourself up to emotions, and easy as pie drifts through my mind. What Lucy said about security recordings, and I pick up my phone and buzz
Bryce.
“Yes, boss,” he says brightly, as if we haven’t chatted in days.
“Our security recordings from the closed-circuit cameras everywhere,” I say. “When was Captain Avallone here from Dover? I understand Jack
gave her a tour.”
“Oh, Lord, that was a while ago. I believe November….”
“I recall she went home to Maine the week of Thanksgiving,” I tell him. “I know she was gone from Dover that week because I had to stay. We
were shorthanded.”
“That sounds about right. I think she was here that Friday.”
“Were you with them on the grand tour?”
“I was not. I wasn’t invited. And Jack spent a lot of time with her in your office, just so you know. In there with the door shut. They ate lunch in
there at your table.”
“This is what I need you to do,” I tell him. “Get hold of Lucy, text-message her or whatever you need to do, and let her know I want a review of
every security recording that has Jack and Sophia on it, including anything in my office.”
“In your office?”
“How long has he been using it?”
“Well…”
“Bryce? How long?”
“Pretty much the entire time. He helps himself when he wants to impress people. I mean, he doesn’t use it for his casework very often, mostly
when he’s being ceremonial….”
“Tell Lucy I want recordings of my office. She’ll know exactly what I mean. I want to see what Jack and the captain were talking about.”
“How delicious. I’ll get right on it.”
“I’m about to make an important call, so please don’t disturb me,” I then say. As I hang up, I realize Benton will be here soon.
But I resist the temptation to rush. Wise to slow down, to allow thoughts and perceptions to sort themselves out, to strive for clarity. You’re tired.
Exercise caution, and play it smart when you’re this tired. There’s one way to do this right, and every other way is wrong. You won’t know the right
way until it happens, and you won’t recognize it if you’re wound up and muddled. I reach for my coffee but change my mind about that, too. It won’t
help at this point, will only make me jittery and upset my stomach more. Pulling another pair of examination gloves out of a box on the granite
counter behind my desk, I remove the document from the plastic bag I sealed it in.
I slide the two folded sheets of heavy paper out of the envelope I slit open in Benton’s SUV as we drove through a blizzard what now seems
like a lifetime ago but hasn’t even been twelve hours. In the light of morning and after so much has happened, it seems more unusual than it did that
this classical pianist who Bryce described as intelligent and reasonable would have used duct tape on her fine engraved stationery. Why not regular
tape that is transparent instead of this ugly wide strip of lead-gray across the back? Why not do what I do when I enclose a private memo in an
envelope and simply sign your name or initials over the seal of the flap? What was Erica Donahue afraid would happen? That her driver might want
to read what she wrote to someone named Scarpetta who he apparently had never heard of?
I smooth open the pages with my cotton-gloved hand and try to intuit what the mother of a college boy who has confessed to murder transferred
to the keys of her typewriter, as if what she felt and believed as she composed her plea to me is a chemical I can absorb that will get me into her
mind. It occurs to me I’ve come up with such an analogy because of the plastic film I found in the pocket of Fielding’s lab coat. Hours beyond that
unnerving druggy experience, I can see just how bad it really was and that I could not have been myself with Benton, and how uncomfortable it must
have been for him. Maybe that’s why he’s being so secretive and is lecturing me about divulging information to whoever happens to be nearby, as if
I, of all people, don’t know better. Maybe he doesn’t trust my judgment or self-control and fears that the horrors of war changed me. Maybe he’s not
so sure that the woman who came home to him from Dover is the one he knows.
I’m not who you used to know floats through my head. I’m not sure you ever knew me is a whisper in my thoughts, and as I read the neat rows
of single-spaced type, I find it remarkable that in two pages there isn’t one mistake. I see no evidence of white-out or correction tape, no
misspellings or bad grammar. When I think back to the last typewriter I used, a dusky pink IBM Selectric I had in Richmond the first few years I was
there, I remember my chronic aggravation with ribbons that broke or having to swap out the golf ball-like element when I wanted to change fonts,
and dealing with a dirty platen that left smudges on paper, not to mention my own hurried fingers hitting the wrong keys, and while my spelling and
grammar are good, I’m certainly not infallible.
As my secretary Rose used to say when she’d walk in with my latest effort typed on that damn machine, “And on what page is this in Strunk
and White, or maybe it’s in the MLA style guide and I just can’t find it? I’ll redo it, but every time you type something yourself?” And she’d flap her
hand in that characteristic gesture of hers that said to me Why bother?, and then I stop those thoughts because it makes me sad when I think about
her. I’ve missed Rose every day since she died, and if she were here right now, somehow things would be different. Things would feel different, if
nothing else. For me she was my clarity. For her I was her life. No one like Rose should be gone from this earth, and I still can’t believe it, and now is
not a good time to think about the blond young man in black high-top sneakers sitting next door instead of her. I need to focus. Focus on Erica
Donahue. What will I do with this woman? I am going to do something, but I must be shrewd.
She must have typed her letter to me more than once, as many times as it took to make it impeccable, and I’m reminded that when her driver
rolled up in the Bentley he didn’t seem to know that the intended recipient of the envelope sealed with duct tape is a woman, and indeed seemed to
think a silver-haired man was me. I remind myself that the mother of Johnny Donahue also doesn’t seem aware that the forensic psychologist
evaluating him, this same silver-haired man, is my husband, and also contrary to what’s in her letter, there is no unit for the “criminally insane” at
McLean, nor has anyone deemed that Johnny is criminally insane, which is a legal term and not a diagnosis. According to Benton, she also has
other facts wrong.
She has confused details that may very well hurt her son, possibly damaging an alibi that potentially is his strongest. Claiming he left The
Biscuit in Cambridge at one p.m. instead of at two, as Johnny maintains, she has made it far more believable that he could have found
transportation and gotten to Salem in time to kill Mark Bishop around four that afternoon. Then there is her reference to her son reading horror
novels and enjoying horror films and violent entertainment, and finally what she said about Jack Fielding and a nail gun and a Satanic cult, none of
that correct or proven.
Where did she get those dangerous details—where, really? I suppose Fielding could have put such ideas in her head when he talked to her on
the phone, if it’s true he’s the one now spreading these rumors, that he’s lying, which is what Benton seems to think. Regardless of what Fielding
did or didn’t do or his truths or untruths or his reasons for anything that is happening, my questions come back to the mother of Johnny Donahue. I
make myself bring all of it back to her, because what I fail to see is motivation that is logical. Her delivering this letter to me really doesn’t sit well at
all. It feels off. It feels wrong.
For one so meticulous about typos and sentence construction, not to mention the attention she must pay to her music, it strikes me that she
doesn’t seem to care nearly as much as she should about the facts of her son’s confession to one of the most heinous acts of violence in recent
memory. Every detail counts in a case like this, and how could an intelligent, sophisticated woman with expensive lawyers not know that? Why
would she take the chance of divulging anything to someone like me, a complete stranger, especially in writing, when her son faces being locked up
for the rest of his life in a forensic psychiatric facility like Bridgewater or, worse, in a prison, where a convicted child-killer with Asperger’s, a socalled
savant who can work the most difficult math problems in his head but is impaired when it comes to everyday social cues, isn’t likely to survive
very long?
I refresh myself on all these facts and relevant points at the same time I realize I’m feeling and behaving as if they matter to me. And they
shouldn’t. I’m supposed to be objective. You don’t take sides, and it’s not your job to care, I tell myself. You don’t care about Johnny Donahue or
his mother one way or other, and you’re not a detective or the FBI, I think sternly. You’re not Johnny’s defense attorney or his therapist, and
there’s nothing for you to get involved in, I then say to myself severely, because I don’t feel convinced. I’m struggling with impulses that have
become impossibly strong, and I’m not sure how to turn them off or if I can or should. I do know I don’t want to.
Some of what I’ve grown accustomed to not only at Dover but on non-combat-related matters that are the jurisdiction of the AFME or what
basically is the federal medical examiner is far too compatible with my true nature, and I don’t want to go back to the staid old way of doing things.
I’m military and I’m not. I’m civilian and I’m not. I’ve been in and out of Washington and lived on an air force base and routinely been sent on
recovery missions of air crashes and accidents during training exercises and deaths on military installations or fatalities involving special forces,
the Secret Service, a federal judge, even an astronaut in recent months, handling a multitude of sensitive situations I can’t talk about. What I’m
feeling is the not part of the equation. I’m not any one thing, and I’m not feeling at all inclined to surrender to limitations, to sit on my hands because
something isn’t my department.
As an officer involved in medical intelligence, I’m expected to investigate certain aspects of life and death that go far beyond the usual clinical
determinations. Materials I remove from bodies, the types of injuries and wound ballistics, the strengths and failures of armor, and infections,
diseases, lesions, whether from parasites or sand fleas, and extreme heat, dehydration, and boredom, depression, and drugs are all matters of
national defense and security. The data I gather aren’t just for the sake of families and usually aren’t destined for criminal court but can have a
bearing on the strategies of war and what keeps us safe domestically. I’m expected to ask questions. I’m expected to follow leads. I’m expected to
pass along information to the surgeon general, the Department of Defense, to be intensely industrious and proactive.
You’re home now. You don’t want to come across as a colonel or a commander, certainly not as a prima donna . You don’t want to get a
case null prossed or thrown out of court. You don’t want to cause trouble. Isn’t there enough already? Why would you encourage more? Briggs
doesn’t want you here. Be careful you don’t justify his position. Your own staff doesn’t seem to want you here or know you’re here. Don’t make it
easy for you not to be. Your only legitimate purpose in contacting Erica Donahue is to ask her kindly not to contact you or your office again, for
her own good, for her own protection. I decide to use those exact words, and I almost believe my motivation as I call the home phone number typed
at the end of her letter.
17
The person who answers doesn’t seem to understand what I’m saying, and I have to repeat myself twice, explaining that I’m Dr. Kay Scarpetta and
I’m responding to a letter I just received from Erica Donahue, and is she available, please?
“I beg your pardon,” the well-modulated voice says. “Who is this?” A woman’s voice, I’m fairly sure, although it is low, almost in the tenor range,
and could belong to a young man. In the background a piano plays, unaccompanied, a solo.
“Is this Mrs. Donahue?” I’m already getting an uncomfortable feeling.
“Who is this, and why are you calling?” The voice hardens and enunciates crisply.
I repeat what I said as I recognize a Chopin etude, and I remember a concert at Carnegie Hall. Mikhail Pletnev, who was stunning in his
