technical mastering of a composition that is very hard to play. The music of someone detailed and meticulous who likes everything just so.
Someone who isn’t careless and doesn’t make mistakes. Someone who wouldn’t mar a fine engraved envelope by slapping on duct tape.
Someone who isn’t impulsive but very studied.
“Well, I don’t know who this really is,” says the voice, what I now believe is Mrs. Donahue’s voice, stony and edged with distrust and pain. “And I
don’t know how you got this number, since it’s unlisted and unpublished. If this is some sort of crank call, it’s absolutely outrageous, and whoever
you are, you should be ashamed of yourself—”
“I assure you this is not a crank call,” I interrupt before she can hang up on me as I think about her listening to Chopin, Beethoven, Schumann,
worrying her life away, agonizing over a son who probably has caused her anguish since she gave birth to him. “I’m the director of the Cambridge
Forensic Center, the chief medical examiner of Massachusetts,” I explain authoritatively but calmly, the same voice I use with families who are on
the verge of losing control, as if she is Julia Gabriel and about to shriek at me. “I’ve been out of town, and when I arrived at the airport last night, your
driver was there with your letter, which I’ve carefully read.”
“That’s absolutely impossible. I don’t have a driver, and I didn’t write you a letter. I’ve written no one at your office and have no idea what on
earth you’re talking about. Who is this? Who really, and what do you want?”
“I have the letter in front of me, Mrs. Donahue.”
I look at it on top of my desk and smooth it open again, being careful and deliberate as it nags at me to ask her about Fielding and why she
called him and what he said to her. It nags at me that I don’t want her to hate me or think I’m unfeeling and anything other than honest. It’s possible
Fielding disparaged me to her the same way I suspect he did with Julia Gabriel. I’m close to asking, but I stop myself. What has been said, and
what has Erica Donahue been led to believe? But not now. Self-control, I tell myself.
Mrs. Donahue asks indignantly, “What does it say that’s supposedly from me?”
“A creamy rag paper with a watermark.” I hold the top sheet of paper up to my desk lamp, adjusting the shade so the bulb shines directly
through the paper, showing the watermark clearly, like the inner workings of a soft-shell crab showing through pearly skin. “An open book with three
crowns,” I say, and I’m shocked.
I don’t let her hear it in my voice. I make sure she can’t begin to sense what is racing through my mind as I describe to her what I’m seeing, like
a hologram, in the sheet of paper I hold up to the light: an open book between two crowns, with a third crown below, and above that three cinquefoil
flowers. And it is the flowers Marino neglected to mention that so glaringly aren’t Oxford’s coat of arms, that so glaringly aren’t the coat of arms for
the online City University of San Francisco. What I’m looking at isn’t what Benton found on the Internet early this morning while all of us were in the xray
room, but it’s what I saw on the gold signet ring I took out of the evidence locker before I came upstairs after looking at the dead man’s clothes.
I open the small manila envelope and shake the ring out into the palm of my gloved hand. The gold catches the lamplight and is bright against
white cotton as I turn it different ways to look at it, noting it is badly scratched and the bottom of the band is worn thin. The ring looks old, like an
antique, to me.
“Well, that sounds like my crest and my paper. I admit it does,” Mrs. Donahue is saying over the phone, and then I read to her the Beacon Hill
address engraved on the envelope and letterhead, and she confirms it also is hers. “My personal stationery? How is that possible?” She sounds
angry, the way people get when they’re scared.
“What can you tell me about your crest? Would you mind explaining it to me?” I ask.
I look at the identical crest engraved in the yellow-gold signet ring that I now hold under a hand lens. The three crowns and the open book are
large in the magnifying glass, and the engraving is almost gone in spots, the five-petal flowers, the cinquefoils especially, just a ghost of what was
once deeply etched because of the age of the ring, which has been subjected to wear and tear by someone, or perhaps by a number of people,
including the man from Norton’s Woods, who was wearing it on the little finger of his left hand when he was murdered. There can be no mistake he
had it on, that the ring came in with his body. There was no mixup by police, a hospital, a funeral home. The ring was there when Marino removed
the man’s personal effects yesterday morning and locked them up and kept the key until he turned it over to me.
“My family name is Fraser,” Mrs. Donahue explains. “It’s my family coat of arms, that particular emblazon for Jackson Fraser, a greatgrandfather
who apparently changed the design to incorporate elements such as Azure in base, a border Or, and a third crown Gules, which you
can’t see unless you’re looking at a replica of the coat of arms that displays the tinctures, such as what is framed in my music room. Are you saying
someone wrote a letter on my stationery and had a driver hand-deliver it to you? I don’t understand or see how it’s possible, and I don’t know what it
means or why someone would do something like that. What kind of car was it? We certainly don’t have a driver. I have an old Mercedes, and my
husband drives a Saab and isn’t in the country right now, anyway, and we’ve never had a driver. We only use drivers when we travel.”
“I’m wondering if your family coat of arms is on anything else. Embroidered, engraved, besides being framed on the wall in your music room,
anywhere else it might appear. If it’s known or published, if someone could have gotten hold of it.” No matter how I phrase it, it sounds like a
peculiar thing to quiz her about.
“Get hold of it to do what ultimately? What goal?”
“Your stationery, for example. Let’s think about that and what the ultimate goal might be.”
“Is what you have engraved or printed?” she then asks. “Can you tell the difference between engraved and printed by looking at what you
have?”
You don’t know who he is, I’m thinking. You don’t know that the man who died wearing that ring isn’t a member of her family, a relative, and I
remember Benton saying Johnny Donahue has an older brother who works at Langley. What if he happened to be in Cambridge yesterday, staying
at an apartment near Harvard, maybe a friend’s apartment that has an obsolete packbot in it, a friend with a greyhound, a friend who perhaps works
in a robotics lab? What if the older brother or some other man significant to Mrs. Donahue had just been overseas, in the UK, and had flown back
here unexpected and is dead and she doesn’t know, the Donahue family doesn’t know? What does Johnny’s brother look like?
Don’t ask her.
“The stationery is engraved,” I answer Mrs. Donahue’s question.
What if her family is somehow connected with Liam Saltz or with someone who might have attended his daughter’s wedding on Sunday? Might
the Donahues have a connection to a member of Parliament named Brown?
Stay away from it.
“Well, you can’t pull engraved stationery out of a hat, have it made in a minute,” Mrs. Donahue is saying.
Now I’m looking at the envelope, at the duct tape on the back that I didn’t cut through, that I thought to preserve.
“Especially if you don’t have the copperplates,” she adds.
We use sticky-sided tape all the time in forensics, to collect trace evidence from carpet, from upholstery, to lift fibers, paint chips, glass
fragments, gunshot residue, minerals, even DNA and fingerprints, from all types of surfaces, including human bodies. Anybody could know that. Just
watch television. Just Google “crime scene investigative techniques and equipment.”
“If someone got hold of my copperplates? But who? Who could have them?” she protests. “Without those, it would take weeks. And if you do
press proofs, which of course I do, add several more weeks. This makes no sense.”
She wouldn’t put duct tape on the back of her elegant envelope that took many weeks to engrave. Not this precise, proud woman who listens to
Chopin etudes. If someone else did, then I might have an idea why. Especially if it was someone who knows me or knows the way I think.
“And yes, the crest is on a number of things. It’s been in my family for centuries,” she adds, because she wants to talk. There is much pent up
inside her, and she wants to let it out.
Allow it.
“Scottish, but you probably guessed that based on the name,” she then says. “Framed on the wall in the music room, as I mentioned, and
engraved on some of my family silverware, and we did have some silver stolen years ago by a housekeeper who was fired but never charged with
anything because we really couldn’t prove it to the satisfaction of the Boston police. I suppose my family silver could have ended up in a pawnshop
around here. But I don’t see what that could have to do with my stationery. It sounds as if you’re implying someone might have made engraved
stationery identical to mine with the goal of impersonating me. Or someone stole it. Are you suggesting identity theft?”
What to say? How far do I go?
“What about anything else that might have been stolen, anything else with your family crest on it?” I don’t want to directly ask her about the ring.
“Why do you ask? Is there something else?”
“I have a letter that is supposedly from you,” I reiterate instead of answering her questions. “It’s typed on a typewriter.”
“I still use a typewriter,” she verifies, and sounds bewildered. “But usually I write letters by hand.”
“Might I ask with what?”
“Why, a pen, of course. A fountain pen.”
“And the type style on your typewriter, which is what kind? But you might not know the typeface. Not everybody would.”
“It’s just an Olivetti portable I’ve had forever. The typeface is cursive, like handwriting.”
“A manual one that must be fairly old.” As I look at the letter, at the distressed cursive typeface made with metal typebars striking an inked
ribbon.
“It was my mother’s.”
“Mrs. Donahue, do you know where your typewriter is?”
“I’m going to walk over there, to the cabinet in the library where it’s kept while I’m not using it.”
I hear her moving into another area of the house, and it sounds as if she sets what must be a portable phone down on a hard surface. Then a
series of doors shut, perhaps cabinet doors, and a moment later she is back on with me and almost breathless as she says, “Well, it’s gone. It’s not
here.”
“Do you remember when you saw it last?”
“I don’t know. Weeks ago. Probably around Christmas. I don’t know.”
“And it wouldn’t be someplace else. Perhaps you moved it or someone borrowed it?”
“No. This is terrible. Someone took it and probably took my stationery, too. The same one who wrote to you as if it was me. And I didn’t. I most
assuredly didn’t.”
The first person to come to mind is her own son Johnny. But he is at McLean. He couldn’t possibly have borrowed her typewriter, her pen, her
stationery, and then hired a man and a Bentley to deliver a letter to me. Assuming he could have known when I was flying in last night on Lucy’s
helicopter, and I’m not going to ask his mother about that, either. The more I ask her, the more information I give.
“What’s in the letter?” she persists. “What did someone write as if it’s from me? Who could have taken my typewriter? Should we call the
police? What am I saying? You are the police.”
“I’m a medical examiner,” I correct her matter-of-factly as Chopin’s tempo quickens, a different etude. “I’m not the police.”
“But you are, really. Doctors like you investigate like the police and act like the police and have powers they can abuse like the police. I talked
to your assistant, Dr. Fielding, about what’s being blamed on my son, as I know you’re very well aware. You must know I’ve called your office about
it and why. You must know why and how wrong it is. You sound like a fair-minded woman. I know you haven’t been here, but I must say I don’t
understand what’s been condoned, even from a distance.”
I swivel around in my chair, facing the curved wall behind me that is nothing but glass, my office shaped exactly like the building if you laid it on
its side, cylindrical and rounded at one end. The morning sky is bright blue, what Lucy calls severe clear, and I notice something moving in the
security display, a black SUV parking in back.
“I was told you called to speak to him,” I reply, because I can’t say what is about to boil out of me. What isn’t fair? What have I condoned? How
did she know I haven’t been here? “I can understand your concern, but—”
“I’m not ignorant,” Mrs. Donahue cuts me off. “I’m not ignorant about these things, even if I’ve never been involved in anything so awful ever
before, but there was no reason for him to be so rude to me. I was within my rights to ask what I did. I fail to understand how you can condone it, and
maybe you really haven’t. Maybe you aren’t aware of the entire sordid mess, but how could you not be? You’re in charge, and now that I have you on
the phone, perhaps you can explain how it’s fair or appropriate or even legal for someone in his position to be involved in this and have so much
power.”
The word careful flashes in my mind, as if there is a warning light in my head flashing neon-red.
“I’m sorry if you feel he was rude or unhelpful.” I abide by my own warning and am careful. “You understand we can’t discuss cases with…”
“Dr. Scarpetta.” Sharp piano notes sound as if responding to her or the other way around. “I would never and I most assuredly did not,” she
says emotionally. “Will you excuse me while I turn this down? You probably don’t know Valentina Lisitsa. If only I could just listen and not have all
these other dreadful things banging in my head, like pots and pans banging in my head! My stationery, my typewriter. My son! Oh, God, oh, God.”
As the music stops. “I didn’t ask Dr. Fielding prying questions about someone who was murdered, much less a child. If that’s what he’s told you I
called about, it’s absolutely untrue. Well, I’ll just say it. A lie. A damn lie. I’m not surprised.”
“You called wanting to speak to me,” I say, because that’s all I really know other than her claims to Bryce about Johnny and his innocence and
allergies. She obviously has no idea I’ve not talked to Fielding, that no one has, it seems. And the more I downplay what she’s saying or outright
