necessary. They aren’t natural to me, not to anyone in my volatile, dramatic family, and that much I know is true about what I come from. The rest I’m
not so sure about.
My ancestors were farmers and worked for the railroads, but in recent years my mother has added artists, philosophers, martyrs, and God
knows what to the mix as she has set about to research our genealogy. According to her, I’m descended from artisans who built the high altar and
choir stalls and made the mosaics at Saint Mark’s Basilica and created the fresco ceiling of the Chiesa dell’Angelo San Raffaele. Somehow I have
a number of friars and monks in my past, and most recently—based on what I don’t know—I share blood with the painter Caravaggio, who was a
murderer, and have some tenuous link to the mathematician and astronomer Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for heresy during the
Roman Inquisition.
My mother still lives in her small house in Miami and is pre-possessed with her efforts to explain me. I’m the only physician in the family tree
that she knows of, and she doesn’t understand why I’ve chosen patients who are dead. Neither my mother nor my only sibling, Dorothy, could
possibly fathom that I might be partly defined by the terrors of a childhood consumed by tending to my terminally ill father before I became the head
of the household at the age of twelve. By intuition and training, I’m an expert in violence and death. I’m at war with suffering and pain. Somehow I
always end up in charge or to blame. It never fails.
I shut the door on what has been my home not just for six months but more than that, really. Briggs has managed to remind me where I’m from
and headed. It’s a course that was set long before this past July, as long ago as 1987, when I knew my destiny was public service and didn’t know
how I could repay my medical-school debt. I allowed something as mundane as money, something as shameful as ambition, to change everything
irrevocably and not in a good way—indeed, in the worst way. But I was young and idealistic. I was proud and wanted more, not understanding then
that more is always less if you can’t be sated.
Having gotten full rides through parochial school and Cornell and Georgetown Law, I could have begun my professional life unburdened by the
obligations of debt. But I’d turned down Bowman Gray Medical School because I wanted Johns Hopkins badly. I wanted it as badly as I’d ever
wanted anything, and I went there without benefit of financial aid, and what I ended up owing was impossible. My only recourse was to accept a
military scholarship as some of my peers had done, including Briggs, who I was acquainted with in the earliest stage of my profession, when I was
assigned to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, the AFIP, the parent organization of the AFME. A quiet stint of reviewing military autopsy
reports at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., Briggs led me to believe, and once my debt was paid, I’d move on to a solid
position in civilian legal medicine.
What I didn’t plan on was South Africa in December of ‘87, what was summertime on that distant continent. Noonie Pieste and Joanne Rule
were filming a documentary and about my same age when they were tied up in chairs, beaten, and hacked, broken bottle glass shoved up their
vaginas, their windpipes torn out. Racially motivated crimes against two young Americans. “You’re going to Cape Town,” Briggs said to me. “To
investigate and bring them home.” Apartheid propaganda. Lies and more lies. Why them and why me?
As I take the stairs down to the lobby, I tell myself not to think about this right now. Why am I thinking about it at all? But I know why. I was
yelled at over the phone this morning. I was called names, and what happened more than two decades ago is now before me again. I remember
autopsy reports that vanished and my luggage gone through. I remember being certain I would turn up dead, a convenient accident or suicide, or
staged murder, like those two women I still see in my head. I see them as clearly as I did then, pale and stiff on steel tables, their blood washing
through drains in the floor of a morgue so primitive we used handsaws to open their skulls, and there was no x-ray machine, and I had to bring my
own camera.
I drop off my key at the front desk and replay the conversation I just had with Briggs, and I have clarity. I don’t know why I didn’t see the truth
instantly, and I think of his remote tone, his chilly deliberateness, as I watched him through glass. I’ve heard him talk this way before, but usually it is
directed at others when there is a problem of a magnitude that places it out of his hands. This is about more than his personal opinion of me. This is
about something beyond his typical calculations and our conflicted past.
Someone has gotten to him, and it wasn’t the press secretary, not anyone at Dover but higher up than that. I feel certain Briggs conferred with
Washington after Marino divulged information, running his mouth and spinning his wild speculations before I’d had the chance to say a word. Marino
shouldn’t have discussed the Cambridge case or me. He’s set something into motion he doesn’t understand, because there’s a lot he doesn’t
understand. He’s never been military. He’s never worked for the federal government and is clueless about international affairs. His idea of
bureaucracy and intrigue is local police department policies, what he rubber-stamps as bullshit. He has no concept of power, the kind of power that
can tilt a presidential election or start a war.
Briggs would not have suggested sending a military plane to Massachusetts for the transfer of a body to Dover unless he’s gotten clearance
from the Department of Defense, the DoD—in other words, the Pentagon. A decision has been made and I’m not part of it. Outside, in the parking
lot, I climb into the van and won’t look at Marino, I’m so angry.
“Tell me more about the satellite radio,” I say to Lucy, because I intend to get to the bottom of this. I intend to find out what Briggs knows or has
been led to believe.
“A Sirius Stiletto,” Lucy says from the dark backseat as I turn up the heat because Marino is always hot while the rest of us freeze. “It’s basically
nothing more than storage for files, plus a power source. Of course, it also works as a portable XM radio, just as it’s designed to, but it’s the
headphones that are creative. Not ingenious but technically clever.”
“They’ve got a pinhole camera and a microphone built in,” Marino offers as he drives. “Which is why I think the dead guy was the one doing the
spying. How could he not know he had an audiovisual recording system built into his headphones?”
“He might not have known. It’s possible someone was spying on him and he had no idea,” Lucy says to me, and I sense she and Marino have
been arguing about it. “The pinhole is on top of the headband but in the edge of it and hard to see. Even if you noticed, it wouldn’t necessarily cross
your mind that built inside is a wireless camera smaller than a grain of rice, an audio transmitter that’s no bigger, and a motion sensor that goes to
sleep after ninety seconds if nothing’s moving. This guy was walking around with a micro-webcam that was recording onto the radio’s hard drive
and an additional eight-gig SD card. It’s too soon for me to tell you if he knew it—in other words, if he rigged this up himself. I know that’s what
Marino thinks, but I’m not at all sure.”
“Does the SD card come with the radio, or was it added after-market?” I inquire.
“Added. A lot of storage space, in other words. What I’m curious about is if the files were periodically downloaded elsewhere, like onto his
home computers. If we can get hold of them, we might know what this is about.”
Lucy is saying that the video files she has looked at so far don’t tell us much. She has reason to suspect the dead man has a home computer,
possibly more than one of them, but she hasn’t found anything that might tell us where he lived or who he is.
“What’s stored on the hard drive and SD card go back only as far as February fifth, this past Friday,” she continues. “I don’t know if that means
the surveillance just started, or more likely, these video files are large and take up a lot of space on the hard drive. They probably get downloaded
somewhere, and what’s on the hard drive and SD card gets recorded over. So what’s here may be just the most recent recordings, but that doesn’t
mean there aren’t others.”
“Then these video clips were probably downloaded remotely.”
“That’s what I would do if it were me doing the spying,” Lucy says. “I’d log in to the webcam remotely and download what I wanted.”
“What about watching in real time?” I then ask.
“Of course. If he was being spied on, whoever’s doing it could log on to the webcam and watch him as it’s happening.”
“To stalk him, to follow him?”
“That would be a logical reason. Or to gather intelligence, to spy. Like some people do when they suspect their person is cheating on them.
Whatever you can imagine, it’s possible.”
“Then it’s possible he inadvertently recorded his own death.” I feel a glint of hope and at the same time am deeply disturbed by the thought. “I
say ‘inadvertently’ because we don’t know what we’re dealing with. For example, we don’t know if he intentionally recorded his own death, if he’s
therefore a suicide, and I’m not ready to rule out anything.”
“No way he’s a suicide,” Marino says.
“At this point, we shouldn’t rule out anything,” I repeat.
“Like a suicide bomber,” Lucy says. “Like Columbine and Fort Hood. Maybe he was going to take out as many people as he could in Norton’s
Woods and then kill himself, but something happened and he never got the chance.”
“We don’t know what we’re dealing with,” I say again.
“The Glock had seventeen rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber,” Lucy tells me. “A lot of firepower. You could certainly ruin
someone’s wedding. We need to know who got married and who attended.”
“Most of these people have extra magazines,” I reply, and I know all about the shootings at Fort Hood, at Virginia Tech, at far too many places,
where assailants open fire without necessarily caring who they kill. “Usually these people have an abundance of ammunition and extra guns if
they’re planning on mass murder. But I agree with you. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is a high-profile place, and we should find out
who got married there yesterday and who the guests were.”
“I figure you’re a member,” Marino says to me. “Maybe you got a contact for getting a list of members and a schedule of events.”
“I’m not a member.”
“You’re kidding.”
I don’t offer that I haven’t won a Nobel Prize or a Pulitzer and don’t have a Ph.D., just an M.D. and a J.D., and they don’t count. I could remind
him that the Academy may not be relevant anyway, because nonmembers can rent the building. All it takes is connections and money. But I don’t
feel like giving Marino detailed explanations. He shouldn’t have called Briggs.
“Good news and not so good about the recordings.” Lucy reaches over the back of the seat and hands me her iPad. “Good news, as I’ve
pointed out, is it doesn’t appear anything’s been deleted, at least not recently. Which could be an argument in favor of him being the one doing the
spying. You might speculate that if someone had him under surveillance and has something to do with his death, that person likely would have
logged on to the web address and scrubbed the hard drive and SD before people like us could look.”
“Or how about remove the damn radio and headphones from the damn scene?” Marino says. “If he was being stalked, hunted down, and
whoever’s doing it whacked him? Well, if it was me, I’d grab the headset and radio and keep walking. So I’m betting he was the one doing the
recording. I don’t believe for a minute someone else was. And I’m betting this guy was involved in something, and whatever the reason for the spy
equipment, he was the only one who knew about it. What sucks is there’s no recording of the perp, of whoever whacked him, which is significant. If
he was confronted by someone while he was walking his dog, why didn’t the headphones record it?”
“The headphones didn’t record it because he didn’t see the person,” Lucy replies. “He wasn’t looking at whoever it was.”
“Assuming there was a person who somehow caused his death,” I remind both of them.
“Right,” she says. “The headphones pretty much pick up whatever the wearer is looking at, the camera on the crown of his head, pointing
straight out like a third eye.”
“Then whoever whacked him came up from behind,” Marino states conclusively. “And it happened so fast the victim never even turned around.
Either that or it was some kind of sniper attack. Maybe he was shot with something from a distance. Like a dart with poison. Aren’t there some
poisons that cause hemorrhaging? May sound far-fetched, but shit like this happens. Remember the KGB spy poked with an umbrella that had ricin
in the tip? He was waiting at a bus stop, and no one saw a thing.”
“It was a Bulgarian dissident who worked for the BBC, and it’s not a certainty it was an umbrella, and you’re getting deeper into the woods
without a map,” I tell him.
“Ricin wouldn’t drop you in your tracks, anyway,” Lucy says. “Most poisons won’t. Not even cyanide gas. I don’t think he was poisoned.”
“This isn’t helpful,” I answer.
“My map is my experience as a cop,” Marino says to me. “I’m using my deductive skills. They don’t call me Sherlock for nothing.” He taps his
baseball cap with a thick index finger.
“They don’t call you Sherlock at all.” Lucy’s voice from the back.
“It’s not helpful,” I repeat, looking at his big shape as he drives, at his huge hands on the wheel, which rubs against his gut even when he’s in
what he considers his fighting shape.
“Aren’t you the one always telling me to think outside the box?” Defensiveness hardens his tone.
“Guessing isn’t helpful. Connecting dots that might be the wrong dots is reckless, and you know it,” I say to him.
Marino has always been inclined to jump to conclusions, but it’s gotten worse since he took the job in Cambridge, since he went to work for me
again. I blame it on a military presence in our lives that is as constant as the massive airlifters flying low over Dover. More directly, I blame it on
Briggs. Marino is ridiculously enamored of this powerful male forensic pathologist who is also a general in the army. My connection to the military
has never mattered to him or even been acknowledged, not when it was part of my past, not when I was recalled to a special status after 9/11.
