Then we stop talking about it, because we have reached the girder bridge that connects Cambridge to Boston, the Mass Ave Bridge, or what the locals refer to as the Harvard Bridge or MIT Bridge, depending on their loyalties. Just ahead, my headquarters rises like a lighthouse, silo-shaped with a glass dome on top, seven stories sided in titanium and reinforced with steel. The first time Marino saw the CFC he decided it looked like a dum-dum bullet, and in the snowy dark, I suppose it does.
Turning off Memorial Drive, away from the river, we take the first left into the parking area, illuminated by solar security lights and surrounded by a black PVC-coated fence that can’t be climbed or cut. I dig a remote control out of my bag and push a button to open the tall gate, and we drive over tire tracks that are almost completely covered in fresh white powder. Anne and Ollie’s cars are here, parked near the CFC’s all-wheel-drive cargo vans and SUVs, and I notice one is missing, one of the SUVs. There should be four, but one of them is gone and has been since before it began to snow, probably the on-call medicolegal investigator.
I wonder who is on duty tonight and why that person is out in one of our vehicles. At a scene, or is the person at home, and I look around as if I’ve never been here before. Above the fence on two sides are lab buildings that belong to MIT, glass and brick, with antennas and radar dishes on the roofs, the windows dark except for a random few glowing dimly, as if someone left a desk light or a lamp on. Snow streaks the night and is loud like a brittle rain as Benton pulls close to my building, into the space designated for the director, next to Fielding’s spot, which is empty and smooth with snow.
“We could put it in the bay,” Benton says hopefully.
“That would be a little spoiled, since no one else can,” I reply. “And it’s unauthorized, anyway. For pickups and deliveries only.”
“Dover’s worn off on you. Am I going to have to salute?”
“Only at home.”
We climb out, and the snow is up to the ankles of my boots and doesn’t pack under them because it is too cold, the flakes tiny and icy. I enter a code in a keypad next to a shut bay door that begins to retract loudly as Marino and Lucy drive into the lot. The receiving bay looks like a small hangar sealed with white epoxy paint, and mounted in the ceiling is a monorail crane, a motorized lifter for moving bodies too large for manual handling. There is a ramp inside leading to a metal door, and parked off to the side is our white van-body truck, what at Dover we refer to as a bread truck, designed to transport up to six bodies on stretchers or in transfer cases and to serve as a mobile crime scene lab when needed.
As I wait for Marino and Lucy, I’m reminded I’m not dressed for New England. My tactical jacket was perfectly adequate in Delaware, but now I’m thoroughly chilled. I try not to think about how good it would be to sit in front of the fire with a single-malt Scotch or small-batch bourbon, to catch up with Benton about things other than tragedy and betrayal and enemies with long memories, to get away from everyone. I want to drink and talk honestly with my husband, to put aside games and subterfuge and not wonder what he knows. I crave a normal time with him, but we don’t know what that is. Even when we make love we have our secrets and nothing is normal.
“No updates except Lawless.” Marino answers a question no one asked as the bay door clanks down behind us. “He e-mailed scene photographs—finally. But says no luck with the dog. No one’s called to report a lost greyhound.”
“What greyhound?” Benton asks.
I was too busy describing MORT and didn’t mention much else I saw on the video clips. I feel foolish. “Norton’s Woods,” I reply. “A black-and-white greyhound named Sock that apparently ran off while the EMTs were busy with our case.”
“How do you know his name is Sock?”
I explain it to him as I hold my thumb over the glass sensor of the biometric lock so it can scan my fingerprint. Opening the door that leads into the lower level of the building, I mention that the dog might have a microchip that could supply useful information about the owner’s identification. Some rescue groups automatically microchip former racing greyhounds before putting them up for adoption, I add.
“That’s interesting,” Benton says. “I think I saw them.”
“He stared right at you as you were pulling out of the driveway in your sports car about three-fifteen yesterday afternoon,” Lucy tells him as we enter the processing area, an open space with a security office, a digital floor scale, and a wall of massive stainless-steel doors that open into cooler rooms and a walk-in freezer.
“What are you talking about?” Benton asks my niece.
“All that time in the car driving through a blizzard and you didn’t catch him up on things?” Lucy says to me, and she’s not easy to be around when she gets like this.
I feel a prick of annoyance even though she’s right.
Instead, I obsessed about DARPA because I was really obsessing about Briggs. I can’t get past what happened earlier today, about what happened decades ago, about how what he caused never seems to end. He knows about that dark place in my past, a place I take no one, and a part of me will never forgive him for creating that place. It was his idea for me to go to Cape Town. It was his goddamn brilliant plan.
“He and the greyhound walked right past your driveway just minutes before he died,” Lucy is telling Benton, but her gaze is steady on me. “If you hadn’t left, you would have heard the sirens. You probably would have headed over there to see what was going on and maybe would have some useful information for us.”
She looks at me as if she is looking at the dark place. It’s not possible she could know about it, I reassure myself. I’ve never told her, never told Benton or Marino or anyone. The documents were destroyed except for what I have. Briggs promised that decades ago when I left the AFIP and moved to Virginia, and I already knew reports were missing without being told. Lucy doesn’t have the combination to my safe, I remind myself. Benton doesn’t. No one does.
“If you drop by my lab,” Lucy is saying to Benton, “I’ll show the video clips to you.”
“You haven’t seen them,” I say to Benton, because I’m not sure. He’s acting as if he hasn’t seen them, but I don’t know if it’s just more of the same, more secrets.
“I haven’t,” he answers, and it sounds like the truth. “But I want to, and I will.”
“Weird you’re in them,” Lucy says to him. “Your house is in them. Really weird. Sort of freaked me out when I saw it.”
The night security guard sits behind his glass window, and he nods at us but doesn’t get up from his desk. His name is Ron, a big, muscular dark-skinned man with closely shorn hair and unfriendly eyes. He seems afraid of me or skeptical, and it’s obvious he’s been instructed to maintain his post, not to be sociable, no matter who it is. I can only imagine the stories he’s heard, and Fielding enters my thoughts again. What has happened to him? What trouble has he caused? How much has he hurt this place?
I walk over to the security guard’s window and check the sign-in log. Since three p.m., three bodies have come in: a motor-vehicle fatality, a gunshot homicide, and an asphyxiation by plastic bag that is undetermined.
“Is Dr. Fielding here?” I ask Ron.
Retired marine corps military police, he is always neat and proud in his midnight-blue uniform with American flag and AFME patches on the shoulders and a brass CFC security shield pinned to his shirt. His face is wary and not the least bit warm behind his glass partition as he answers that he hasn’t seen Fielding. He tells me that Anne and Ollie are here but no one else. Not even the on-call death investigator is in. Janelle, he informs me in a monotone, and every other word is
“We’ll be in the x-ray room,” I inform Ron. “If anybody else shows up, you can find us in there. But unless it’s Dr. Fielding, I need to know who it is and give clearance. Actually, I probably should know if Dr. Fielding shows up, too. You know what, no matter who it is, I need to know.”
