“Freezes wound tissue instantly, thus delaying bleeding and attracting other predators, so if you have to defend yourself against a great white shark, for example, it won’t begin bleeding into the water and attracting other sharks until you are well out of the way.” I skim and summarize and feel sickened. “It’s called a WASP. You can add it into your shopping cart for less than four hundred dollars.”
“Let’s talk about it when I see you,” Benton says over the phone.
“I’ve never heard of it.” I read more about a compressed gas injection knife I can order right now as long as I’m over eighteen years of age. “Advertised for Special Ops, SWAT, pilots who are stranded in open water, scuba divers. Apparently developed to kill large marine predators—as I said, sharks, mammals, maybe whales and those in wet suits….”
“Kay?”
“Or grizzly bears, for example, while you’re minding your own business on a friendly hike through the mountains.” I make no effort to keep the sarcasm out of my tone, to hide the anger I feel. “And, of course, military, but nothing I’ve seen in military casualties—”
“I’m on a cell phone,” Benton interrupts me. “I’d rather you don’t mention this to anyone else. No one in your office, or have you already?”
“I haven’t already.”
“You’re by yourself?” he asks me again.
“And maybe you could delete it from your history, empty your cache, in case anybody decides to view your recent searches.”
“I can’t stop Lucy from doing that.”
“I don’t care if Lucy does it.”
“She’s not here. I don’t know where she went.”
“I know,” he says.
“All right, then.” He’s not going to tell me where she is or where anybody is, it seems. “I’ll make evidence rounds, take care of as much as I can and meet you downstairs in back when you get here.” I hang up and try to reason through what just happened. I try not to feel hurt by him as I logically sort it out.
Benton didn’t sound surprised or especially concerned. He didn’t seem alarmed by what I’ve discovered but by my discovering it and the possibility that I might have told someone else, and that probably means the same thing I’ve been sensing since I returned home from Dover. Maybe I’m not the one finding things out. Maybe I’m simply the last one to know and nobody wants me to find out anything. What an unexpected predicament to be in, if not an unprecedented one, I think, as I do what Benton asked and empty the cache and clear the history, making it problematic for anyone to see what I’ve been searching on the Internet. As I do this I wonder who really asked: My husband, or was it the FBI asking? Who was just talking to me and telling me what to do as if I don’t know better?
It’s almost nine, and most of my staff is already here, those who aren’t using the snow as an excuse to stay home or to go somewhere else they’d rather be, such as skiing in Vermont. On the security monitor I’ve watched cars pull into the lot and seen some people coming through the back door but far more arriving by way of the civilized entrance on the ground floor, through the stone lobby with its formidable carvings and flags, avoiding the dreary domain of the dead on the lower level. The scientists rarely need to meet the patients whose body fluids and belongings and other evidence they test, and then I hear the sounds of my administrator, Bryce, unlocking the door in the hallway that opens onto his adjoining office.
I reseal the blotting paper in a clean envelope and unlock a drawer to gather other items I’ve been keeping safe as I try not to sink into a dark space, thinking dark thoughts about what I just looked at on a website and what it implies about human beings and their capacity to create imaginative ways to do harm to other creatures. In the name of survival, it crosses my mind, but then rarely is it really about staying alive; instead, it’s about making sure something else doesn’t, and the power people feel when they can overpower, maim, kill. How terrible, how awful, and I have no doubt about what happened to the man from Norton’s Woods, that someone came up behind him and stabbed him with an injection knife, blasting a ball of compressed gas into his vital organs, and if it was CO2, there is no test that will tell us. Carbon dioxide is ubiquitous, literally as present as the air we exhale, and I envision what I saw on CT, the dark pockets of air that had been blown into the chest and what that must have felt like and how I will answer the same question I’m always asked.
Did he suffer?
The truthful answer would be no one knows such a thing except the person who is dead, but I would say no, he didn’t suffer. I would say he felt it. He felt something catastrophic happening to him. He wasn’t conscious long enough to suffer during the agonal last moments of his life, but he would have felt a punch to his lower back accompanied by tremendous pressure in his chest as his organs ruptured, all of it happening at once. That would have been the last thing he felt except possibly a glimmer, a flash, of a panicked thought that he was about to die, and then I stop thinking about it because to obsess and imagine further would become useless and self-indulgent theorizing that is paralyzing and nonproductive. I can’t help him if I’m upset.
I’m worthless to anyone if I feel what I feel, just as it was when I took care of my father and became an expert at pushing down emotions that climbed up inside me like some desperate creature trying to get out. “I worry what you have learned, my little Katie,” my father said to me when I was twelve and he was a skeleton in the back bedroom, where the air was always too warm and smelled like sickness and light seeped wanly through the slatted shades I kept closed most of the way his last months. “You have learned things you shouldn’t ever have to learn but especially at your age, my little Katie,” he said to me as I made the bed with him still in it, having learned to wash him religiously so he wasn’t overcome by pressure sores, to change his soiled sheets by moving his body, a body that seemed hollowed out and dead except for the heat of his fever.
I would gently rock my father to his side, holding him up on one side, then the other, leaning him against me because he could not get up in the end, couldn’t even sit up. He was too weak to help me move him during what his doctor called the blast phase of chronic myeloid leukemia, and at times he enters my mind and I feel the weight of him against me when I’m swathed in protective clothing, peering through protective glasses, at work at my hard steel table.
I fill out lab analysis requests that will need to be signed by each scientist I receipt various items to so I can keep the chain of evidence intact. Then I get up from my desk.
16
Knocking once, I open the door that leads into Bryce’s office.
Our shared entrance is directly across from the door to my private bath, which I’ve learned to keep open a crack. When both metal gray doors are shut I have had a tendency to get mixed up and walk in on Bryce when I’m interested in coffee or washing up or I find myself about to hand paperwork to a toilet and a sink. He is at his desk with his chair rolled back and has taken off his coat, which is draped over the back, but he still has on his big designer sunglasses that look ridiculously heavy, as if drawn on with a dark-brown crayon. He struggles with a pair of L.L.Bean snow boots that don’t go with his typically deliberate ensemble, which today is a navy cashmere blazer, tight black jeans, a black turtleneck, and a tooled leather belt with a big silver buckle shaped like a dragon.
“I’ll be on the phone and can’t be disturbed,” I tell him as if I’ve been here every day for these past six months, as if I’ve never been gone. “Then I have to leave.”
“Is someone going to tell me what’s going on around here? And welcome home, boss.” He looks up at me, his eyes masked by the big, dark glasses. “I don’t suppose the unmarked cars in the parking lot are a surprise party, because I know I’m not throwing one. Not that I wouldn’t and wasn’t intending to eventually, but whoever they are, they aren’t here because of me, and when I asked one of them to be so kind as to give me an explanation and please move his ass so I could park in my spot, he was shall we say
“The case from yesterday morning,” I start to say.
“Oh, is that why? Well, no wonder.” His face brightens as if what I just said is somehow good news. “I knew it was going to be important, I somehow knew it. But he didn’t really die here, please tell me it’s not true, that you
