reminding me a bit of a C-17. Homeland Security is conducting air surveillance, and I’ve been told that, too. I don’t know why federal law
enforcement has taken to the air or the land or the sea unless there is a concern about the overall security of the Salem Harbor, a significant port
with a huge power plant. I have heard the word terrorism mentioned, just in passing by Benton and also by Marino when I had him on the phone a
few minutes ago, but these days I hear that word a lot. In fact, I hear it all the time. Bioterrorism. Chemical terrorism. Domestic terrorism. Industrial
terrorism. Nanoterrorism. Technoterrorism. Everything is terrorism if I stop to think about it. Just as every violent crime is hateful and a hate crime,
really.
I continue going back to Otwahl, everything leading me back to Otwahl, my thoughts carried on the wing of a flybot or, as Lucy puts it, not a
flybot but the holy grail of flybots. Then I think about my old nemesis MORT, a life-size model of it perched like a giant mechanical insect inside a
Cambridge apartment rented by Eli Goldman, and next I worry about the controversial scientist Dr. Liam Saltz, who must be heartbroken beyond
remedy. Maybe he simply got caught in one of those ghastly coincidences that happens in life, his tragic misfortune to be the stepfather of a brilliant
young man who slipped into bad science, bad drugs, and illegal firearms.
A kid too smart for his own good, as Benton puts it, murdered while wearing an antique signet ring missing from Erica Donahue’s house, just
as her stationery is missing, and her typewriter and a fountain pen, items that Fielding must have gotten hold of somehow. He must have gotten his
hands on all sorts of things from the rich Harvard student he bullied, Johnny Donahue, and it doesn’t matter if it all feels wrong to me. I can’t prove
that Fielding didn’t exchange the gold ring for drugs. I can’t prove he didn’t exchange the Glock for drugs. I can’t say that’s not why Eli had the ring
and the gun, that there’s some other reason far more nefarious and dangerous than what Benton and others are proposing.
I can say and have said that Eli Goldman was an obstruction to the mercenary progress of a company like Otwahl, and Otwahl is the common
denominator in everything, more so than tae kwon do or Fielding. As far as I’m concerned, if Fielding is as directly and solely responsible as
everyone is claiming, then we should be taking a very hard and different look at Otwahl and wonder what he had to do with the place beyond being
a user or a research subject or even someone who helped distribute experimental drugs until they brought about his complete annihilation.
“Otwahl and Jack Fielding,” I said to Benton a little while ago. If Fielding is guilty of murder and case-tampering and obstruction of justice and
all sorts of lies and conspiracies, then he’s intimately connected with Otwahl, right down to its parking lot, where his Navigator likely got tucked out
of sight last night during a blizzard. “You have to make that connection in a meaningful way,” I repeatedly told Benton on our drive to this desolate
spot that is achingly beautiful and yet ruined, as if Fielding’s property is an ugly stain on the canvas of an exquisite seascape.
“Otwahl Technologies and an eighteenth-century sea captain’s house on Salem Neck,” I said to my husband, and I asked his opinion, his
honest and objective opinion. After all, he should have a very well-informed and completely objective opinion because of his alliance with the wellinformed
and completely objective we‘s, as I stated it, these anonymous comrades of his, the shadowy rank and file of an FBI he doesn’t belong to
anymore, he claims, and of course I don’t believe him. He is FBI, all right, as secretive and driven as I remember him from times long past, and
maybe I could put up with that if I didn’t feel so utterly alone.
He’s not even listening to me anymore, pretty much checked out when I made the comment a few minutes ago that Fielding must have some
link to Otwahl beyond his teaching martial arts to a few brainy students who had internships with the technology behemoth. The connection must be
more than just drugs, I said. Drug-impregnated pain-relieving patches can’t be the entire explanation for what I’m about to find inside a tiny stone
outbuilding that Fielding was turning into a guest quarters before he supposedly found another use for it that has earned it several new names.
The Kill Cottage, I think darkly, bitterly. The Semen’s House, I think cynically.
Destined to be Salem’s latest attraction during Halloween, which lasts all of October, with a million people making a pilgrimage here from all
over the land. Another example of a place made famous by atrocities that don’t seem real anymore, tall tales, almost cartoonish, like the witch on
her broom depicted on the Salem logo that is on police patches and even painted on the police cruiser doors. Be careful what you hate and
murder, because one day it will own you. The Witch City, as people have dubbed the place where those men and women were herded up to what is
now called Gallows Hill Park, a spot similar to where Fielding bought a sea captain’s house. Places that don’t change much. Places that are now
parks. Only Gallows Hill is ugly, and it should be. An open field ravaged by the wind, and barren. Mostly rocks, weeds, and patchy, coarse grass.
Nothing grows there.
Thoughts like these are solar flares, and peak and spike with a timing I can’t seem to control, as Benton touches my elbow, then grips it firmly,
while we cross the sandy dead-end street that has turned into a parking lot of law-enforcement vehicles, marked and unmarked, some with the
Salem logo, silhouettes of witches straddling their brooms. Pulled up close to the sea captain’s house, almost right up against the back of it, is the
CFC’s white van-body truck that Marino drove here hours earlier while I was in the autopsy room and then upstairs, having no idea what was
happening some thirty miles northeast. The back of the truck is open, and Marino is inside, wearing green rubber boots and a bright-yellow hard hat
and a bright-yellow level-A suit, what we use for demanding jobs that require protection from biological and chemical hazards.
Cables snake over the diamond-steel floor and out the open metal doors, over the unpaved icy drive, and disappear through the front of the
stone cottage, what must have been a charming, cozy outbuilding before Fielding turned it into a construction site of exposed foundation blocks, the
ground frozen with ice that is gray. The area behind the sea captain’s house is an eyesore of spilled cement and toppled piles of lumber and bricks,
and rusting tools, shingles, weather stripping, and nails everywhere. A wheelbarrow is covered loosely with a black tarp that flaps, the entire
perimeter strung with yellow crime scene tape that shakes and jumps in the wind.
“We got enough juice in this thing for lights and that’s it, got about a hundred and twenty minutes of run time left,” Marino says to me as he digs
inside a built-in storage bin.
What he’s referring to is the auxiliary power unit, the APU, which can keep the truck’s electrical system running while the engine is off and
supplies a limited amount of emergency power externally.
“Assuming the power doesn’t come back on, and maybe we’ll get lucky. I’ve heard it could anytime, the main problem being those poles
knocked over by snapped-off trees you probably drove past on Derby Street on your way here. But even if we get the electricity back, it won’t help
much in there.” He means in the stone outbuilding. “No heat in there. It’s cold as shit, and after a while it gets to you, I’m just telling you,” he says
from inside the truck while Benton and I stand outside in the wind and I flip up the collar of my jacket. “Cold as our damn fridge at the morgue, if you
can imagine working in there for hours.”
As if I’ve never worked a scene in frigid weather and am unfamiliar with a morgue cooler.
“Course, there are some advantages to that if the power goes out, which it’s going to do in these parts when you get storms, and he didn’t
have a backup generator,” Marino continues.
He means that Fielding didn’t.
“And that’s a lot of money to lose if the freezer quits. Which is why plugging in a space heater and turning it on high was for the obvious reason
of ruining the DNA so we’d never know who he’d taken the shit from. Do you think that’s possible?” he asks me.
“I’m not sure which part of it—” I start to say.
“That we won’t ID them. Possible we won’t?” Marino continues talking nonstop, as if he’s been drinking coffee since I saw him last. His eyes
are bloodshot and glassy.
“No,” I reply. “I don’t think it’s possible. I think we’ll find out.”
“So you don’t think it’s as worthless as tapioca.”
“Christ,” Benton says. “I could have done without that. Christ, I wish you’d stop with the fucking food analogies.”
“Low copy number.” I remind Mario we can get a DNA profile from as little as three human cells. Unless virtually every cell is degraded, we’ll be
okay, I assure him.
“Well, it’s only fair we really try.” Marino talks to me as if Benton’s not here, directing his every comment to me as if he’s in charge and doesn’t
want to be reminded of my FBI or former FBI husband. “I mean, what if it was your son?”
“I agree we have to ID them and let their next of kin know,” I reply.
“And get sued, now that I think of it,” Marino reconsiders. “Well, maybe we shouldn’t tell anyone. Seems to me we just need to know who it
came from. Why tell the families and open a can of worms?”
“Full disclosure,” Benton says ironically, as if he really knows what that is. He is looking at his iPhone, reading something on it, and he adds,
“Because a lot of them probably already know. We’re assuming Fielding arranged with them up front to pay for the service he was offering. It’s not
possible to hide anything.”
“We’re not going to,” I answer. “We don’t hide things, period.”
“Well, I’ll tell you. I’m thinking we really should install cameras inside our cooler, not just outside in the hall and the bay and certain rooms but
actually in there,” Marino says to me, as if it has always been his belief that we should have cameras inside the coolers, probably inside the freezer,
too. In fact, he’s never mentioned the idea before now. “I wonder if cameras would work in a cooler….” he is saying.
“They work outdoors. It gets colder in the winter around here than it is in the cooler,” Benton comments dully, barely listening to Marino, who is
full of himself, enjoying his role in the drama that has unfolded, and he’s never liked Fielding. I can’t think of a bigger I told you so.
“Well, we got to do it,” Marino says to me. “Cameras and no more of this shit, of people doing shit they think they can get away with.”
I look behind us at boots and shoes lined up outside the opening that leads into the cottage. The Kill Cottage, the Semen’s Cottage. Some
cops are calling it the Little Shop of Horrors.
“Cameras,” I hear Marino as I stare at the stone cottage. “If we had them in the cooler, we’d have it all on tape. Well, hell, maybe it’s a good
thing. Shit, imagine if something like that got leaked and ended up on YouTube. Fielding doing that to all these dead bodies. Jesus. I bet you have
cameras like that at Dover, though.”
He hands us folded bright-yellow suits like his.
“Dover must have cameras in the coolers, right?” he goes on. “I’m sure DoD would spring for it, and nothing like the present to ask, right? In
light of the circumstances, I don’t think anything’s off the table when it comes to beefing up security at our place….”
I realize Marino is still talking to me, but I don’t answer because I’m worrying about what’s in the cab of the truck. I’m suddenly overwhelmed by
pity as I stand outside in the cold and wind and glare, my level-A suit folded up and tucked under my arm while Benton is putting his on.
And Marino goes on quite cheerfully, as if this is quite the carnival, “… Like I said, a good thing it’s cold. I can’t imagine working this on one of
those ninety-degree days like we used to get in Richmond, where you can wring water out of the air and nothing’s stirring. I mean, what a fucking
pig. Don’t even look at the toilet in there; probably the last time it was flushed was when they were still burning witches around here….”
“They were hanged,” I hear myself say.
Marino looks at me with a blank expression on his big face, and his nose and ears are red, the hard hat perched on top of his bald head like
the bonnet of a yellow fireplug.
“How’s he doing?” I indicate the cab of the truck and what’s inside it.
“Anne’s a regular Dr. Dolittle. Did you know she wanted to be a vet before she decided to be Madam Curie?” He still says curry, like curry
powder, no matter how many times I’ve told him it’s Cure-ee, like the element curium that’s named after Madame Cure-ee.
“I tell you what, though,” he then says to me. “It’s a good thing the heat hadn’t been off in the house more than five, six hours before anybody got
here. Dogs like that don’t have much more hair than I do. He’d dug himself under the covers in Fielding’s rat’s nest of a bed and was still shivering
like he was having a seizure. Of course, he was scared shitless. All these cops, the FBI storming in with all their tactical gear, the whole nine yards.
Not to mention I’ve heard that greyhounds don’t like to be left alone, have what do you call it, separation anxiety.”
He opens another storage bin and hands me a pair of boots, knowing my size without asking.
“How do you know it’s Jack’s bed?” I ask.
“It’s his shit everywhere. Who else’s would it be?”
“We need to be sure of everything.” I’m going to keep saying it. “He was out here in the middle of nowhere. No neighbors, no eyes or ears, the
park deserted this time of year. How do you know for a fact he was alone out here? How can you be absolutely certain he didn’t have help?”
“Who? Who the hell would help him do something like this?” Marino looks at me, and I can see it on his big face, what he thinks. I can’t be
rational about Fielding. That’s exactly what Marino thinks, probably what everybody thinks.
“We need to keep an open mind,” I reply, then I indicate the cab of the truck again and ask again about the dog.
“He’s fine,” Marino says. “Anne got him something to eat, chicken and rice from that Greek diner in Belmont, made him a nice comfy bed, and
the heat’s blasting, feels like an oven, probably sucking up more to keep his skinny ass warm than we’re using in the cellar. You want to meet him?”
