Port Mortuary (2010)

partially covers an address engraved in an old-style serif typeface. I recognize the street as one in Boston’s Beacon Hill, near the Public Garden, very close to where Benton used to own a brownstone that was in his family for generations. On the front of the envelope is Dr. Kay Scarpetta: Confidential written elaborately with a fountain pen, and I’m careful about touching anything else with bare hands, especially the tape. It is a good source for fingerprints, for DNA and microscopic materials. Latent prints can be developed on porous surfaces such as paper by using a reagent such as ninhydrin, I calculate.

“Maybe you’ve got a knife handy.” I place the envelope in my lap. “And I need to borrow your gloves.”

Benton reaches across me and opens the glove box, and inside is a Leatherman multi-tool knife, a flashlight, a stack of napkins. He pulls a pair of deerskin gloves out of his coat pockets, and my hands are lost in them, but I don’t want to leave my fingerprints or eradicate those of someone else. I don’t turn on the map reading light, because the visibility is bad and getting worse. Illuminating what I’m doing with the flashlight, I slip a small blade into a corner of the envelope.

I slit it along the top and slide out two folded sheets of creamy stationery that are of heavy stock with a watermark I can’t make out clearly, what looks like some type of emblazonment or family crest. The letterhead is the same Beacon Hill address, and the two pages are typed with a typewriter that has a cursive typeface, which is something I haven’t seen in many years, maybe a decade at least. I read out loud:

Dear Dr. Scarpetta,

I hope you will excuse what I’m sure must seem an inappropriate and presumptuous gesture on my part. But I am a mother as desperate as a mother could possibly be.

My son Johnny has confessed to a crime I know he did not commit and could not have committed. Certainly he’s had difficulties of late that resulted in our seeking treatment for him, but even so, he’s never demonstrated any serious behavior problems, not even when he began Harvard as a withdrawn and bullied fifteen-year-old. If he was going to have a breakdown, I should think it would have been then, having left home for the first time and not possessing the normal skills for interacting with others and making friends. He did remarkably well until this past fall semester of his senior year, when his personality became alarmingly altered. But he did not kill anyone!

Dr. Benton Wesley, a consultant for the FBI and a member of the McLean Hospital staff, knows quite a lot about my son’s background and developmental obstacles, and perhaps he is at liberty to discuss these details with you, since he hasn’t seemed inclined to discuss them with your assistant, Dr. Fielding. Johnny’s is a long, complex story, and I need you to hear it. Suffice it to say that when he was admitted at McLean last Monday, it was because he was deemed to be a danger to himself. He had not harmed anybody else or so much as intimated that he might. Then suddenly out of the blue he confessed to such a vicious and horrible crime, and in short order was transferred to a locked ward for the criminally insane. I ask you, how is it possible the authorities have been so quick to believe his ludicrous and deluded tales?

I must talk to you, Dr. Scarpetta. I know your office performed the autopsy on the little boy who died in Salem, and I believe it is reasonable to request a second opinion. Of course you know Dr. Fielding’s conclusion—that the murder was premeditated, carefully planned, a cold-blooded execution that was an initiation for a satanic cult. Something as monstrous as that is absolutely inconsistent with anything my son could do to anyone, and he has never had anything to do with cults of any description. It is outrageous to assume that his fondness of books and films with a horror or supernatural or violent theme might have influenced him to “act out.”

Johnny suffers from Asperger’s syndrome. He is spectacularly gifted in some areas and completely incompetent in others. He has very rigid habits and routines that he is obsessive about, and on January 30, he was eating brunch at The Biscuit with the person he is closest to, a supremely gifted graduate student named Dawn Kincaid, just as they do every Saturday morning from ten a.m. until one p.m. He could not, therefore, have been in Salem when the little boy was killed mid-afternoon.

Johnny has the remarkable ability to remember and parrot the most obscure details, and it is clear to me that what he has said to the authorities has come straight from what he’s been told about the case and what’s been in the news. He truly does seem to believe he is guilty (for reasons I can’t begin to comprehend), and even claims that a “puncture wound” to his left hand was from the nail gun misfiring when he used it on the boy, which is fabricated. The wound is self-inflicted, a stab wound from a steak knife, and one of the many reasons we took him to McLean to begin with. My son seems determined to be severely punished for a crime he didn’t commit, and the way things are going, he will get his wish.

Below are numbers to contact me. I hope you will have compassion and that I hear from you soon.

Sincerely,

Erica

Erica Donahue

6

I return the sheets of heavy, stiff stationery to their envelope, then wrap the letter in napkins from the glove box to protect it as much as possible inside the zip-up compartment of my shoulder bag. If I have learned nothing else, it is that you can’t go back. Once potential evidence has been cut through, contaminated, or lost, it’s like an archaeologist’s trowel shattering an ancient treasure.

“She doesn’t seem to know you and I are married,” I comment as trees thrash in the wind along the roadside, snow swirling whitely.

“She might not,” Benton replies.

“Does her son know?”

“I don’t discuss you or my personal life with patients.”

“Then she may not know much about me.”

I try to work out how it might be possible that Erica Donahue wouldn’t tell her driver that the person he was to deliver the letter to is a small blonde woman, not a tall man with silver hair.

“She uses a typewriter, assuming she typed this herself,” I continue to deduce. “And anyone who would go to so much trouble taping up the envelope to ensure confidentiality probably isn’t going to let someone else type the letter. If she still uses a typewriter, it’s unlikely she goes on the Internet and Googles. The watermarked engraved stationery, the fountain pen, the cursive typeface, possibly a purist, someone very precise, who has a very certain and set way of doing things.”

“She’s an artist,” Benton says. “A classical pianist who doesn’t share the same high-tech interests as the rest of her family. Husband’s a nuclear physicist. Older son’s an engineer at Langley. And Johnny, as she pointed out, is incredibly gifted. In math, science. Writing that letter won’t help him. I wish she hadn’t.”

“You seem very invested in him.”

“I hate it when people who are vulnerable are an easy out. Because someone is different and doesn’t act like the rest of us, he must be guilty of something.”

“I’m sure the Essex County prosecutor wouldn’t be happy to hear you say that.” I’ve assumed that’s who hired Benton to evaluate Johnny Donahue, but Benton isn’t acting like a consultant, certainly not like one for the DA’s office. He’s acting like something else.

“Misleading statements, lack of eye contact, false confessions. A kid with Asperger’s and his never-ending isolation and search for friends,” Benton says. “It’s not uncommon for such a person to be overly influenced.”

“Why would someone want to influence Johnny to take the blame for a violent crime?”

“All it takes is the suggestion of something suspicious, such as what a weird coincidence that you were talking crazy about going to Salem, and then that little boy was murdered there. Are you sure you hurt your hand when you stuck it in a drawer and got stabbed by a steak knife, or did it happen some other way and you don’t remember? People see guilt, and then Johnny sees it. He’s led to say what he thinks people want to hear and to believe what he thinks people want to believe. He has no understanding of the consequences of his behavior. People with Asperger’s syndrome, especially teenagers, are statistically overrepresented among innocent people who are arrested and convicted of crimes.”

Snowflakes are suddenly large and blowing wildly like white dogwood petals in a violent wind. Benton