Port Mortuary (2010)

And afterward? Is it what Lucy proposed? Did the person in the long, black coat view the video files and decide it wasn’t necessary to delete them from a webcam site somewhere, that in fact it was clever to leave them?

There are reasons for all things, I tell myself what has always been true but never feels that way while I’m in the middle of the problem. There are answers, and I will find them, and while the physics of how the fatal injury was executed may seem difficult to divine, I assure myself there are tracks the killer left behind. I have captured footprints on blotting paper. I will follow them to who did this. You won’t get away with it, I think, as if I’m talking to the person in the long, black coat. I hope whoever you are, you have nothing to do with me, that you aren’t someone I taught to be meticulous and clever. I have decided that Jack Fielding is on the run or in custody. It even enters my mind that he might be dead. But I’m exhausted. I’m sleep-deprived. My thoughts aren’t as disciplined as they should be. He can’t be dead. Why would he be dead? I have seen the dead downstairs, and he wasn’t among them.

My other patients of the morning were simple enough and asked little of me as I tended to them: a motor- vehicle fatality, and I could smell the booze and his bladder was full, as if he’d been drinking until the moment he left the bar and climbed behind the wheel in a snowstorm that careened him into a tree; a shooting in a run-down motel, and the needle tracks and prison tattoos of yet one more among us who died the way he lived; an asphyxia by a plastic dry-cleaning bag tied around an old widow’s neck with an old red satin ribbon, maybe left over from a holiday during better times, her stomach full of dissolved white tablets and next to the bed, an empty bottle of a benzodiazepine prescribed for sleeplessness and anxiety.

I have no messages on my office and cell phones, no e-mails that matter to me at the moment and under the circumstances. When I checked Lucy’s lab, she wasn’t there, and when I checked with security, I discovered that even Ron has left, replaced by a guard I’ve never met, gangly and jug-eared like Ichabod Crane, someone named Phil who says Lucy’s car isn’t in the lot and the instructions are that the security guards aren’t to let anyone into the building, not through the lower level or the lobby, without clearing it with me. Not possible, I let Phil know. Employees should be showing up already, or they will be at any minute, and I can’t be the gatekeeper. Let anybody in who has a right to be here, I told him before I came upstairs. Except Dr. Fielding, and when I added that, I could tell it wasn’t necessary. The guard named Phil clearly was aware that Fielding can’t just show up or won’t or maybe isn’t able to, and besides, the FBI dominates my parking lot. I can see their SUVs clear as the bright, cold day on the video display on my desk.

I swivel my chair around to the polished black-granite countertop behind me, to my arsenal of microscopes and what accompanies them. Pulling on a pair of examination gloves, I slit open one of the white envelopes I sealed with white paper tape right before I came upstairs, and I pull out a sheet of blotting paper that is stained with a generous smear of dried blood that came from the area of the left kidney where I saw a dense collection of metallic foreign bodies in the MRI. Turning on the lamp of my materials microscope, a Leica I have depended on for years, I carefully move the paper to the stage. I tilt the eyetubes to a viewing angle that won’t strain my neck and shoulders, and realize right away that the settings have been changed for someone much taller than me who is right-handed, someone who drinks coffee with cream and chews spearmint gum, I suspect. The ocular focus and interocular distance have been changed, too.

Switching to left-hand operation and adjusting the height so it is better suited for me, I start with a magnification of 50X, manipulating the focus knob with one hand as I use the other to move the sheet of blotting paper on the stage, lining up the bloody smear until I find what I’m looking for, bright whitish-silver chips and flakes in a constellation of other particles so minute that when I bump the magnification up to 100X, I can’t make out their characteristics, only the rough edges and scratches and striations on the largest particles, what looks like unburned metal chips and filings that have been milled by a machine or a tool. Nothing I see reminds me of gunshot residue, doesn’t even remotely resemble the flakes, disks, or balls I associate with gunpowder or the ragged fragments or particulate of a projectile or its jacket.

More curious is other debris mixed with blood and its obvious elements, the colorful confetti of detritus that constitutes everyday dust tangled with red cells piled up like coins, and granular leukocytes reminiscent of amoeba that are caught as if frozen in time, swimming and cavorting with a louse and a flea that at a magnified size remind me why seventeenth-century London went into a panic when Robert Hooke published Micrographia and revealed the piercing mouthparts and claws of what infested cats and mattresses. I recognize fungi and spores that look like sponges and fruit, spiny pieces of insect legs and insect egg cases that look like the delicate shells of nuts or spherical boxes carved of porous wood. As I move the paper on the stage, I find more hairy appendages of long-dead monsters, such as midges and mites and the wide compound eyes of a decapitated ant, the feathery antenna of what may have been a mosquito, the overlapping scales of animal hair, maybe from a horse or a dog or a rat, and reddish-orange flecks that could be rust.

I reach for the phone and call Benton. When he answers, I hear voices in the background and am subjected to a bad connection.

“A knife sharpened or shaped on something like a lathe, possibly a rusty one in a workshop or basement, possibly an old root cellar where there are mold, bugs, decaying vegetables, probably damp carpet,” I say right off as I begin an Internet search on my computer, typing the keywords knife and exploding gases.

“What was sharpened?” Benton asks, and then he says something to someone else, something like need the keys or need to keep. “I’m moving, not in a good place,” he gets back to me.

“The weapon used to stab him. A lathe, a grinder, possibly old or not taken care of, with traces of rust, based on the metal shavings and very fine particulate I’m seeing. I think the blade was honed, perhaps to make it thinner and to sharpen the tip on both edges, to turn the tip into a spear, so whatever might have been used for sharpening and polishing, a rasp, a file.”

“You’re talking about power tools that are old and rusty. A lot of rust?”

“Metalworking tools of some type, not necessarily power tools; I’m not in a position to be that detailed. I’m not an expert in metalworking and I don’t know how much rust. Just that I found what looks like flakes of it.” Exploding intestines. How to clean your spark plugs. Common gases associated with metalworking and hand-forged knives, I silently read what is on my computer screen as I then say to Benton, “Not that I pretend to be a trace-evidence examiner, but microscopically it’s nothing I’ve not seen before, just never seen it blown into a body. But then I’ve never really looked. I’ve never had a reason to look for something like this, am unaccustomed to using blotting paper internally when someone has been stabbed. I suppose there could be all sorts of invisible fibers, debris, particulate, injected inside people who’ve been shot, stabbed, impaled, or God knows what.”

I type injection knife into the search field because as I listen to myself, I’m reminded of remote delivery darts, of weapons powered by CO₂ to fire what’s basically a long-range immobilization or tranquilizing missile with a small explosive charge and a hypodermic needle. Why couldn’t you do the same thing with a knife, as long as it had a way to be powered and a narrow channel bored through the blade with an outlet hole near the tip?

“I’m walking outside to the car now,” Benton says. “Will be there in forty-five minutes to an hour if the traffic’s not too bad. The roads aren’t bad. One-twenty-eight isn’t too bad.”

“Well, this wasn’t hard.” I’m disappointed. Nothing with so much potential for lethal damage should be this easy to find.

“What isn’t hard?” Benton says as I look in amazement at an image of a steel combat knife with a gas outlet hole near the tip and a neoprene handle in a foam-lined plastic case.

“A CO₂ cartridge screws into the handle….” I skim out loud. “Thrust the five-inch stainless- steel blade into the target as you use your thumb to push the release button, which it appears is part of the guard hub….”

“Kay? Who’s with you right now?”

“Injects a freezing ball of gas the size of a basketball or more than forty cubic inches at eight hundred pounds of pressure per square inch,” I go on, looking at images on an elaborate website as I wonder how many people have such a weapon in their homes, their cars, their camping gear, or are walking around with it strapped to their sides. I have to admit it is ingenious, possibly one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen. “Can drop a large mammal in a single stab…”

“Kay, are you by yourself?”