“You’re kidding.”
“It’s not that we haven’t tried while you were gone. Jack’s been using this work space, and we’ve learned to stay away.”
“How can there be metal that didn’t show up on CT?” Benton watches her scroll through files she created at the neuroimaging lab, looking for the images she wants from the MRI.
“If it’s really small,” I explain to him how it’s possible. “A threshold size of less than point-five millimeters and I wouldn’t expect it to be detected on CT. That’s why we wanted to rule out the possibility by using MR, and apparently it’s a good thing.”
“Although maybe not if he was alive,” Anne says, clicking on a file. “You don’t want something ferromagnetic in a living person, because it’s going to torque. It’s going to move. Like metal shavings in the eyes of people involved in professions that expose them to something like that. They may not even know it until they get an MRI. Then they know it; boy, do they ever. Or if they have body piercings they don’t tell us about, and we’ve seen that enough times,” she says to Benton. “Or, God forbid, a pacemaker. Metal moves, and it heats up.”
“Theories?” I ask her, because I can’t imagine an event or a weapon that could create what has just filled the video display.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” she answers as we study high-resolution images of the dead man’s internal damage, a dark distorted area of signal voids that starts just inside the buttonhole wound and becomes increasingly less pronounced the deeper the penetration inside the organs and soft tissue structures of the chest.
“Because of the magnetic field, even with what must be particles incredibly minute, you’re going to get artifact. Right here,” I point out to Benton. “These very dark and distorted areas where there’s no signal penetration. You get this blooming artifact along the wound track, what’s left of the wound track, because the signal’s been blown out by metal. He’s got some sort of ferromagnetic foreign bodies inside him, all right.”
“What could do that?” Benton asks.
“I’m going to have to recover some of it, analyze it.” I think of what Lucy said about thermite. It would be ferromagnetic just as bullets are, both metal composites having iron oxide in common.
“Point-five? The size of dust?” Benton’s eyes are distracted by other thoughts.
“A little bigger,” Anne replies.
“About the size of gunshot residue, grains of unburned powder,” I add.
“A projectile like a bullet could be reduced to frag no bigger than grains of gunshot powder,” Benton considers, and I can tell he is connecting what I’m saying with something else, and I think of my niece and wonder exactly what she said to him while they were together in her lab this morning. I think of shark bang sticks and nanoexplosives, but there are no thermal injuries, no burns. It wouldn’t make sense.
“No projectile I’ve ever seen,” Anne says, and I agree. “Do we know anything more about who he might be?” She means the body on the table. “I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop.”
“Hopefully soon,” Benton replies.
“It sounds like you might have an idea,” Anne says to him.
“Our first clue was he showed up at Norton’s Woods at the same time Dr. Saltz was inside the building, and that was something to check because of certain interests these two individuals would have in common.” He means robots, I suspect.
“I don’t think I know who that is,” Anne says to him.
“A scientist who won a Nobel Prize and is an expatriate,” Benton says, and as I observe him with Anne I’m reminded they are colleagues and friends, that he treats her with an easy familiarity, with trust that he doesn’t exhibit around most people. “And if he”—Benton indicates the dead man—”knew Dr. Saltz was coming to Cambridge, the question was how.”
“Do we know if he knew that?” I ask.
“Right now we don’t for a fact.”
“So Dr. Saltz was at the wedding. But this one wasn’t dressed for a wedding.” Anne indicates the nude dead body on the table. “He had his dog with him. And a gun.”
“What I know so far is the bride is a daughter from a different marriage,” Benton says as if this detail has been carefully checked. “The daughter’s father, who was supposed to give her away, got sick. So she asked her stepfather, Dr. Saltz, at the last minute, and he couldn’t physically be in two places at once. He flew into Boston on Saturday and made his appearance at Whitehall via satellite. A sacrifice on his part. The last thing he felt like doing, I’m sure, was to reenter the US and show up at Cambridge.”
“The undercover agents?” I ask. “For him? If so, why? I know he has enemies, but why would the FBI be offering protection to a civilian scientist from the UK?”
“That’s the irony,” Benton says. “The security at the event wasn’t about him, was about those attending the wedding, most of them from the UK because of the groom’s family. The groom is Russell Brown’s son, David. Both Liam Saltz’s stepdaughter Ruth and David attend Harvard Law, which is one reason the wedding was here.”
Russell Brown. The shadow secretary of state for defense, whose speech I just read on the RUSI website.
“He shows up at an event like that and is armed,” I say as I move closer to the steel table. “A gun with the serial number eradicated?”
“Right. Why?” Benton asks. “To protect himself, or was he a potential assailant? Or to protect himself for a reason that’s unrelated to the wedding and the people I’ve just mentioned.”
“Possibly top-secret technology he was involved in,” I offer. “Technology worth quite a lot of money,” I add. “Technology people might kill for.”
“And maybe did kill for,” Anne says as she looks at the dead young man.
“Hopefully, we’ll know soon,” Benton says.
I look at the dead man rigidly on his back, his curled fingers and the position of his arms, his legs, his hands, his head, exactly as they were earlier, no matter how much he has been disturbed during transport and scans. Rigor mortis is complete, but he won’t resist me strenuously as I examine him, because he’s thin. He doesn’t have much muscle fiber for calcium ions to have gotten trapped in after his neurotransmitters quit. I can break him easily. I can bend him to my will.
“I’ve got to go,” Benton says to me. “I know you want to get this taken care of. I’ll need your help with something by the time you’re ready to get away from here, and you’re not to get away on your own. Make sure she calls me,” he says to Anne as she labels test tubes and specimen containers. “Call me or call Marino,” he adds. “Give us an hour advance notice.”
“Marino will be with you…?” I start to ask.
“We’re working on something. He’s already there.”
I no longer question what Benton is referring to when he says “we,” and he looks one more time at me, his eyes meeting mine with the intimacy of a lingering touch, and he leaves the autopsy room. I hear the receding sound of his brisk footsteps along the hard tile corridor, then his voice and another voice as he talks to someone, perhaps Ron. I can’t make out a word they are saying, but they sound serious and intense before silence returns abruptly. I imagine Benton has left the receiving area, and on a video display I’m startled by him. Picked up by security cameras, he walks through the bay as he zips up the shearling coat I gave him so long ago I don’t remember the year, only that it was in Aspen, where he used to have a place.
I watch him on closed-circuit TV opening the side door that is next to the massive bay door, and then another camera picks him up outside my building as he walks past his green SUV parked in my spot. He gets into a different SUV, dark and big with bright headlights that the snow slashes through, the wipers sweeping side to side, and I can’t see who is driving. I watch the SUV in my snow-covered lot, backing up, moving forward, and pausing as the big gate opens, and finally out of sight in the bitter weather at the empty hour of four a.m., with my husband in the passenger’s seat, driven by someone, maybe his FBI friend Douglas, both of them headed to a destination that for some reason I’ve not been told about.
14
Inside the anteroom I prepare for battle the way I always do, suiting up in armor made of plastic and paper.
I never feel like a doctor, not even a surgeon, as I get ready to conduct a postmortem examination, and I
