and survey Civil War relics: a belt buckle, a mess kit, a powder horn, a few minie balls that I remember him collecting during our early days in Virginia. But there are no photo graphs, and that makes me sad. In some places I can see what’s gone in blank spaces of wall where he’s not bothered to fill in the tiny holes left from hanging hooks he removed.
It stings that he no longer displays familiar pictures taken when he was my forensic pathology fellow, candid shots of us in the morgue or the two of us out at death scenes with Marino, the lead homicide detective for Richmond PD in the late eighties, the early nineties, when both Fielding and I were just getting started, although in completely different ways. He was the good-looking doctor beginning his career, while I was shifting mine into the private sector, transitioning into civilian life and the role of chief, doing my best not to look back. Maybe Fielding isn’t looking back, although I don’t know why. His old days were good days compared to mine. He didn’t help cover up a crime. He’s never had anything on par with that to hide from. Not that I know of, but I have to wonder. What do I know anymore?
Not much, except I sense he’s gotten rid of me, maybe gotten rid of all of us. I sense he’s gotten rid of more than he ever has before. It is something I’m convinced of without knowing exactly why. Certainly his personal property is still here, his Gore-Tex rain suit on a hanger, and his neoprene hip waders, his dive bag of scuba gear and scene case stowed in a closet, and his collection of police patches and police and military challenge coins. I remember helping him move into this office. I even helped him arrange his furniture, both of us complaining and laughing and then griping some more as we moved the desk, then his conference table, then moved them again and again.
“What is this, Laurel and Hardy?” he said. “You going to push a mule up the stairs next?”
“You don’t have stairs.”
“I’m thinking of getting a horse,” he said as we moved the same chairs we’d just moved earlier. “There’s a horse farm about a mile from the house. I could board the horse there, maybe ride it to work, to crime scenes.”
“I’ll add that to the employee handbook. No horses.”
We joked and teased each other, and he looked good that day—vital and optimistic, his muscles straining against the short sleeves of his scrubs. He was just incredibly built and healthy-looking then, his face still boyishly handsome, his dark blond hair messy, and he hadn’t shaved for several days. He was sexy and funny, and I remember the whispers and giggles of some of the female staff as they walked past his open door, finding excuses to stare at him. Fielding seemed so happy to be here and with me, and I remember both of us placing photographs and reminiscing about our early days together—photographs that now are gone.
In their place are ones I don’t recall. The pictures are prominently arranged on his shelves and walls, formal poses of him with politicians and military brass, one with General Briggs and even Captain Avallone, perhaps from the tour Fielding gave her. He looks wooden and bored. In a photograph of him in tae kwon do white, mid-flight and kicking an imagined enemy, he looks angry. He looks red-faced and hateful. As I study recent family portraits, I decide he doesn’t look content in them, either, not even when he is holding his two little girls or has his arm around his wife, Laura, a delicate blonde whose prettiness is eroding, as if a trying existence is mapping its course on her physically, etching lines and furrows into a topography that once was graceful and smooth.
She is number three for him, and I can trace his decline as I scan his captured moments in chronological order. When he married her, he looked energetic, with no sign of a rash, and he didn’t have any unseemly bald patches. I pause to admire how amazing he was, shirtless and as hard-bodied as stone in running shorts, washing his Mustang, a ‘67, cherry red with Le Mans stripes down the center of the hood. Then as recently as this past fall, the thickening around his middle; the splotchy, flushed skin; the strands of hair combed back and held in place with gel to hide his alopecia. At a martial-arts competition not even a month ago, he doesn’t look as fit or as spiritually balanced in his grandmaster’s uniform and black belt. He doesn’t look like someone who finds joy in beautiful form or technique. He doesn’t look like someone who honors other people or has self-control or respect for anything. He looks dissipated. He looks slightly deranged. He looks perfectly miserable.
I pick him up and he falls again, only harder each time. It gets uglier. It gets bloodier. Again and again. Like a child who can’t walk, and I won’t accept it until he’s injured beyond fixing. The drama that will always end predictably is the way Benton has described it. Fielding shouldn’t be a forensic pathologist, and it’s because of me that he is. He would have been better off if he’d never met me in the spring of 1988 when he wasn’t sure what he wanted in life and I said I know what you should do. Let me show you. Let me teach you. If he’d never come to Richmond, if he’d never run into me, he might have picked a way to spend his days that would have suited him. His career, his life, would have been about him and not about me.
That really is the bottom line, that he does the best he can in an environment totally destructive to him and finally can’t take it any longer and decompensates, disintegrates, and remembers why he is what he is and who shaped him, and then I loom as huge in his wretched life as a billboard. His answer to these crises is always the same. He vanishes. One day he simply drops off the radar, and what I find in his wake is awful. Cases he mishandled or neglected. Memos that showed his lack of control and dangerous judgment. Hurtful voicemails he didn’t bother to delete because he wanted me to hear them. Damaging e-mails and other communications he hoped I’d find. I sit in his chair and start opening drawers. I don’t have to rummage long.
The file folder isn’t labeled and contains four pages printed at eight-oh-three yesterday morning, February 8, a speech that based on other information in the header and news section is from the Royal United Services Institute’s website. A centuries old British think tank with satellite offices strategically located around the world, RUSI is dedicated to advanced innovations in national and international security, and I can’t imagine Fielding’s interest. I can’t fathom him caring about a keynote address given by Russell Brown, the shadow secretary of state for defense, on his views about the “defense debate.” I skim the conservative member of Parliament’s not-so- startling comments that it isn’t a given the UK will always act as part of an alliance and the economic impact of the war is catastrophic. He makes repeated allusions to misinformation methodically propagated, which is as close as the respectable MP is going to come to outright accusing the United States of orchestrating the invasion of Iraq and dragging the UK along for the ride.
Unsurprisingly, the speech is political, as is almost everything right now in Britain, which holds its general election in three months. Six hundred and fifty seats are being contested, and a major campaign issue is the more than ten thousand British troops fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. Fielding isn’t military, has never paid much attention to foreign affairs or elections, and I don’t know why he would have the slightest interest in what is happening in the UK. I don’t recall that he’s ever even been to the UK. He’s not the sort to be interested in a general election over there or RUSI or any think tank, and knowing him as well as I do, I suspect he intended for me to find this file. He wanted me to see it after he pulled another one of his vanishing stunts. What is it he wants me to know?
Why is he interested in RUSI? And did he come across the speech himself on the Internet, or did someone send it to him? If it was sent to him, by whom? I consider asking Lucy to go into Fielding’s e-mail, but I’m not ready to be that heavy-handed, and I don’t want to be caught. I can lock the door, but my superuser deputy chief could still walk in, because I don’t have confidence that Ron or anyone else will keep Fielding in the security area if he shows up. I have no faith that Ron, who was unfriendly to me and seems to have little regard for me, will detain Fielding or try to get hold of me to ask for clearance. I don’t trust that my staff is loyal to me or feels safe with me or follows my orders, and Fielding could reappear at any moment.
That would be like him. To vanish without warning, then show up just as unexpectedly and catch me red- handed, sitting at his desk, going through his electronic files. It’s just one more thing he’ll use against me, and he’s used plenty against me over the years. What has he been doing behind my back? Let’s see what else I find, and then I’ll know what to do. I look at the time stamp again and imagine Fielding sitting in this very chair at eight-oh- three this morning, printing the speech while Lucy, Marino, Anne, and Ollie, while everybody, was in an uproar
