Port Mortuary (2010)

“I’m about to make an important call, so please don’t disturb me,” I then say. As I hang up, I realize Benton will be here soon.

But I resist the temptation to rush. Wise to slow down, to allow thoughts and perceptions to sort themselves out, to strive for clarity. You’re tired. Exercise caution, and play it smart when you’re this tired. There’s one way to do this right, and every other way is wrong. You won’t know the right way until it happens, and you won’t recognize it if you’re wound up and muddled. I reach for my coffee but change my mind about that, too. It won’t help at this point, will only make me jittery and upset my stomach more. Pulling another pair of examination gloves out of a box on the granite counter behind my desk, I remove the document from the plastic bag I sealed it in.

I slide the two folded sheets of heavy paper out of the envelope I slit open in Benton’s SUV as we drove through a blizzard what now seems like a lifetime ago but hasn’t even been twelve hours. In the light of morning and after so much has happened, it seems more unusual than it did that this classical pianist who Bryce described as intelligent and reasonable would have used duct tape on her fine engraved stationery. Why not regular tape that is transparent instead of this ugly wide strip of lead-gray across the back? Why not do what I do when I enclose a private memo in an envelope and simply sign your name or initials over the seal of the flap? What was Erica Donahue afraid would happen? That her driver might want to read what she wrote to someone named Scarpetta who he apparently had never heard of?

I smooth open the pages with my cotton-gloved hand and try to intuit what the mother of a college boy who has confessed to murder transferred to the keys of her typewriter, as if what she felt and believed as she composed her plea to me is a chemical I can absorb that will get me into her mind. It occurs to me I’ve come up with such an analogy because of the plastic film I found in the pocket of Fielding’s lab coat. Hours beyond that unnerving druggy experience, I can see just how bad it really was and that I could not have been myself with Benton, and how uncomfortable it must have been for him. Maybe that’s why he’s being so secretive and is lecturing me about divulging information to whoever happens to be nearby, as if I, of all people, don’t know better. Maybe he doesn’t trust my judgment or self-control and fears that the horrors of war changed me. Maybe he’s not so sure that the woman who came home to him from Dover is the one he knows.

I’m not who you used to know floats through my head. I’m not sure you ever knew me is a whisper in my thoughts, and as I read the neat rows of single-spaced type, I find it remarkable that in two pages there isn’t one mistake. I see no evidence of white-out or correction tape, no misspellings or bad grammar. When I think back to the last typewriter I used, a dusky pink IBM Selectric I had in Richmond the first few years I was there, I remember my chronic aggravation with ribbons that broke or having to swap out the golf ball-like element when I wanted to change fonts, and dealing with a dirty platen that left smudges on paper, not to mention my own hurried fingers hitting the wrong keys, and while my spelling and grammar are good, I’m certainly not infallible.

As my secretary Rose used to say when she’d walk in with my latest effort typed on that damn machine, “And on what page is this in Strunk and White, or maybe it’s in the MLA style guide and I just can’t find it? I’ll redo it, but every time you type something yourself?” And she’d flap her hand in that characteristic gesture of hers that said to me Why bother?, and then I stop those thoughts because it makes me sad when I think about her. I’ve missed Rose every day since she died, and if she were here right now, somehow things would be different. Things would feel different, if nothing else. For me she was my clarity. For her I was her life. No one like Rose should be gone from this earth, and I still can’t believe it, and now is not a good time to think about the blond young man in black high-top sneakers sitting next door instead of her. I need to focus. Focus on Erica Donahue. What will I do with this woman? I am going to do something, but I must be shrewd.

She must have typed her letter to me more than once, as many times as it took to make it impeccable, and I’m reminded that when her driver rolled up in the Bentley he didn’t seem to know that the intended recipient of the envelope sealed with duct tape is a woman, and indeed seemed to think a silver-haired man was me. I remind myself that the mother of Johnny Donahue also doesn’t seem aware that the forensic psychologist evaluating him, this same silver-haired man, is my husband, and also contrary to what’s in her letter, there is no unit for the “criminally insane” at McLean, nor has anyone deemed that Johnny is criminally insane, which is a legal term and not a diagnosis. According to Benton, she also has other facts wrong.

She has confused details that may very well hurt her son, possibly damaging an alibi that potentially is his strongest. Claiming he left The Biscuit in Cambridge at one p.m. instead of at two, as Johnny maintains, she has made it far more believable that he could have found transportation and gotten to Salem in time to kill Mark Bishop around four that afternoon. Then there is her reference to her son reading horror novels and enjoying horror films and violent entertainment, and finally what she said about Jack Fielding and a nail gun and a Satanic cult, none of that correct or proven.

Where did she get those dangerous details—where, really? I suppose Fielding could have put such ideas in her head when he talked to her on the phone, if it’s true he’s the one now spreading these rumors, that he’s lying, which is what Benton seems to think. Regardless of what Fielding did or didn’t do or his truths or untruths or his reasons for anything that is happening, my questions come back to the mother of Johnny Donahue. I make myself bring all of it back to her, because what I fail to see is motivation that is logical. Her delivering this letter to me really doesn’t sit well at all. It feels off. It feels wrong.

For one so meticulous about typos and sentence construction, not to mention the attention she must pay to her music, it strikes me that she doesn’t seem to care nearly as much as she should about the facts of her son’s confession to one of the most heinous acts of violence in recent memory. Every detail counts in a case like this, and how could an intelligent, sophisticated woman with expensive lawyers not know that? Why would she take the chance of divulging anything to someone like me, a complete stranger, especially in writing, when her son faces being locked up for the rest of his life in a forensic psychiatric facility like Bridgewater or, worse, in a prison, where a convicted child-killer with Asperger’s, a so-called savant who can work the most difficult math problems in his head but is impaired when it comes to everyday social cues, isn’t likely to survive very long?

I refresh myself on all these facts and relevant points at the same time I realize I’m feeling and behaving as if they matter to me. And they shouldn’t. I’m supposed to be objective. You don’t take sides, and it’s not your job to care, I tell myself. You don’t care about Johnny Donahue or his mother one way or other, and you’re not a detective or the FBI, I think sternly. You’re not Johnny’s defense attorney or his therapist, and there’s nothing for you to get involved in, I then say to myself severely, because I don’t feel convinced. I’m struggling with impulses that have become impossibly strong, and I’m not sure how to turn them off or if I can or should. I do know I don’t want to.

Some of what I’ve grown accustomed to not only at Dover but on non-combat-related matters that are the jurisdiction of the AFME or what basically is the federal medical examiner is far too compatible with my true nature, and I don’t want to go back to the staid old way of doing things. I’m military and I’m not. I’m civilian and I’m not. I’ve been in and out of Washington and lived on an air force base and routinely been sent on recovery missions of air crashes and accidents during training exercises and deaths on military installations or fatalities involving special forces, the Secret Service, a federal judge, even an astronaut in recent months, handling a multitude of sensitive situations I can’t talk about. What I’m feeling is the not part of the equation. I’m not any one thing, and I’m not feeling at all inclined to surrender to limitations, to sit on my hands because something isn’t my department.

As an officer involved in medical intelligence, I’m expected to investigate certain aspects of life and death that go far beyond the usual clinical determinations. Materials I remove from bodies, the types of injuries and wound ballistics, the strengths and failures of armor, and infections, diseases, lesions, whether from parasites or sand fleas, and extreme heat, dehydration, and boredom, depression, and drugs are all matters of national defense and security. The data I gather aren’t just for the sake of families and usually aren’t destined for criminal court but can have a bearing on the strategies of war and what keeps us safe domestically. I’m expected to ask questions. I’m expected to follow leads. I’m expected to pass along information to the surgeon general, the Department of Defense, to be intensely industrious and proactive.

You’re home now. You don’t want to come across as a colonel or a commander, certainly not as a prima donna. You don’t want to get a case null prossed or thrown out of court. You don’t want to cause trouble. Isn’t there enough already? Why would you encourage more? Briggs doesn’t want you here. Be careful you don’t justify his position. Your own staff doesn’t seem to want you