Port Mortuary (2010)

there the afternoon before, when he was pronounced. No blood at the scene, not one drop, and now he’s bleeding, and it’s not purge fluid, obviously, because he sure as hell isn’t decomposing. The sheet he’s covered with is bloody, and there’s about a liter of blood in the body pouch, and that’s fucked up. I’ve never seen a dead person start bleeding like that. So I said we got a fucking problem and everybody keep your mouth shut.”

“What did Jack say? What did he do?”

“You’re kidding, right? Some deputy you got. Don’t get me started.”

“Do we have an identification, and why Norton’s Woods? Does he live nearby? Is he a student at Harvard, maybe at the Divinity School?” It’s right around the corner from Norton’s Woods. “I doubt he was attending whatever this event was. Not if he had his dog with him.” I sound much calmer than I feel as we have this conversation in the parking lot of the Eagle’s Rest inn.

“We don’t have many details yet, but it appears it was a wedding,” Marino says.

“On Super Bowl Sunday? Who plans a wedding on the same day as the Super Bowl?”

“Maybe if you don’t want anybody to show up. Maybe if you’re not American or are un-American. Hell if I know, but I don’t think the dead guy was a wedding guest, and not just because of the dog. He had a Glock nine-mil under his jacket. No ID and was listening to a portable satellite radio, so you probably can guess where I’m going with this.”

“I probably can’t.”

“Lucy will tell you more about the satellite-radio part of it, but it appears he was doing surveillance, spying, and maybe whoever he was fucking with decided to return the favor. Bottom line, I’m thinking somebody did something to him, causing an injury that was somehow missed by the EMTs, and the removal service didn’t notice anything, either. So he’s zipped up in the pouch and starts bleeding during transport. Well, that wouldn’t happen unless he had a blood pressure, meaning he was still alive when he was delivered to the morgue and shut inside our damn cooler. Forty-something degrees in there and he would have died from exposure by this morning. Assuming he didn’t bleed to death first.”

“If he has an injury that would cause him to bleed externally,” I reply, “why didn’t he bleed at the scene?”

“You tell me.”

“How long did they work on him?”

“Fifteen, twenty minutes.”

“Possible during resuscitation efforts a blood vessel was somehow punctured?” I ask. “Antemortem and postmortem injuries, if severe enough, can cause significant bleeding. For example, maybe during CPR a rib was fractured and caused a puncture wound or severed an artery? Any reason a chest tube might have been placed presumptively and that caused an injury and bleeding you’ve described?”

But I know the answers even as I ask the questions. Marino is a veteran homicide detective and death investigator. He wouldn’t have commandeered my niece and her helicopter and come to Dover unannounced if there was a logical explanation or even a plausible one, and certainly Jack Fielding would know a legitimate injury from an accidental artifact. Why haven’t I heard from him?

“The Cambridge Fire Department’s HQ is maybe a mile from Norton’s Woods, and the squad got to him within minutes,” Marino says.

We are sitting in the van with the engine off. It is almost completely dark, the horizon and the sky melting into each other with only the faintest hint of light to the west. When has Fielding ever handled a disaster without me? Never. He absents himself. Leaves his messes for others to clean up. That’s why he’s not tried to get hold of me. Maybe he’s walked off the job again. How many times does he need to do that before I stop hiring him back?

“According to them, he died instantly,” Marino adds.

“Unless an IED blows someone into hundreds of pieces, there’s really no such thing as dying instantly,” I reply, and I hate it when Marino makes glib statements. Dying instantly. Dropping dead. Dead before he hit the ground. Twenty years of these generalities, no matter how many times I’ve told him that cardiac and respiratory arrests aren’t causes of death but symptoms of dying, and clinical death takes minutes at least. It isn’t instant. It isn’t a simple process. I remind him again of this medical fact because I can’t think of anything else to say.

“Well, I’m just reporting what I’ve been told, and according to them, he couldn’t be resuscitated,” Marino answers, as if the EMTs know more about death than I do. “Was unresponsive. That’s what’s on their run sheet.”

“You interviewed them?”

“One of them. On the phone this morning. No pulse, no nothing. The guy was dead. Or that’s what the paramedic said. But what do you think he’s going to say—that they weren’t sure but sent him to the morgue anyway?”

“Then you told him why you were asking.”

“Hell, no, I’m not retarded. You don’t need this on the front page of the Globe. This hits the news, I may as well go back to NYPD or maybe get a job with Wackenhut, except no one’s hiring.”

“What procedure did you follow?”

“I didn’t follow shit. It was Fielding. Of course, he says he did everything by the book, says Cambridge PD told him there was nothing suspicious about the scene, an apparent natural death that was witnessed. Fielding gave permission for the body to be transferred to the CFC as long as the cops took custody of the gun and got it to the labs right away so we could find out who it’s registered to. A routine case, and not our fault if the EMTs fucked up, or so Fielding says, and you know what I say? It won’t matter. We’ll get blamed. The media will go after us like nothing you’ve ever seen and will say everything should move back to Boston. Imagine that?”

Before the CFC began doing its first cases this past summer, the state medical examiner’s office was located in Boston and was besieged by political and economic problems and scandals that were constantly in the news. Bodies were lost or sent to the wrong funeral homes or cremated without a thorough examination, and in at least one suspected child-abuse death the wrong eyeballs were tested. New chiefs came and went, and district offices had to be shut down due to a lack of funding. But nothing negative ever said about that office could compare to what Marino is suggesting about us.

“I’d rather not imagine anything.” I open my door. “I’d rather focus on the facts.”

“That’s a problem, since we don’t seem to have any that make much sense.”

“And you told Briggs what you just told me?”

“I told him what he needed to know,” Marino says.

“The same thing you just told me?” I repeat my question.

“Pretty much.”

“You shouldn’t have. It was for me to tell. It was for me to decide what he needs to know.” I’m sitting with the passenger’s door open wide and the wind blowing in. I’m damp from the shower and chilled. “You don’t raise things up the chain just because I’m busy.”

“Well, you were busy as hell, and I told him.”

I climb out of the van and reassure myself that what Marino has just described can’t be accurate. Cambridge EMTs would never make such a disastrous mistake, and I try to conjure up an explanation for why a fatal wound didn’t bleed at the scene and then bled profusely, and I contemplate computing time of death or even the cause of it for someone who died inside a morgue refrigerator. I’m confounded. I haven’t a clue, and most of all I worry about him, this young man delivered to my door, presumed dead. I envision him wrapped in a sheet and zipped inside a pouch, and it’s the stuff of old horrors. Someone coming to inside a casket. Someone buried alive. I’ve never had such a ghastly thing happen, not even close, not once in my career. I’ve never known anyone who has.

“At least there’s no sign he tried to get out of the body bag.” Marino tries to make both of us feel better. “Nothing to indicate he might have been awake at some point and started panicking. You know, like clawing at the zipper or kicking or something. I guess if he struggled he would have been in a weird position on the tray when we found him this morning, or maybe rolled off it. Except I wonder if you would suffocate in one of those bags, now that I think of it. I guess so, since they’re supposed to be water-tight. Even though they leak. You show me a body bag that doesn’t leak. And that’s the other thing. Blood drips on the floor leading from the bay to the fridge.”

“Why don’t we continue this later.” It’s check-in time. There are plenty of people in the parking lot as we walk toward the inn’s modern but plain stucco entrance, and Marino has a big voice that projects as if he’s