Port Mortuary (2010)

here or know you’re here. Don’t make it easy for you not to be. Your only legitimate purpose in contacting Erica Donahue is to ask her kindly not to contact you or your office again, for her own good, for her own protection. I decide to use those exact words, and I almost believe my motivation as I call the home phone number typed at the end of her letter.

17

The person who answers doesn’t seem to understand what I’m saying, and I have to repeat myself twice, explaining that I’m Dr. Kay Scarpetta and I’m responding to a letter I just received from Erica Donahue, and is she available, please?

“I beg your pardon,” the well-modulated voice says. “Who is this?” A woman’s voice, I’m fairly sure, although it is low, almost in the tenor range, and could belong to a young man. In the background a piano plays, unaccompanied, a solo.

“Is this Mrs. Donahue?” I’m already getting an uncomfortable feeling.

“Who is this, and why are you calling?” The voice hardens and enunciates crisply.

I repeat what I said as I recognize a Chopin etude, and I remember a concert at Carnegie Hall. Mikhail Pletnev, who was stunning in his technical mastering of a composition that is very hard to play. The music of someone detailed and meticulous who likes everything just so. Someone who isn’t careless and doesn’t make mistakes. Someone who wouldn’t mar a fine engraved envelope by slapping on duct tape. Someone who isn’t impulsive but very studied.

“Well, I don’t know who this really is,” says the voice, what I now believe is Mrs. Donahue’s voice, stony and edged with distrust and pain. “And I don’t know how you got this number, since it’s unlisted and unpublished. If this is some sort of crank call, it’s absolutely outrageous, and whoever you are, you should be ashamed of yourself —”

“I assure you this is not a crank call,” I interrupt before she can hang up on me as I think about her listening to Chopin, Beethoven, Schumann, worrying her life away, agonizing over a son who probably has caused her anguish since she gave birth to him. “I’m the director of the Cambridge Forensic Center, the chief medical examiner of Massachusetts,” I explain authoritatively but calmly, the same voice I use with families who are on the verge of losing control, as if she is Julia Gabriel and about to shriek at me. “I’ve been out of town, and when I arrived at the airport last night, your driver was there with your letter, which I’ve carefully read.”

“That’s absolutely impossible. I don’t have a driver, and I didn’t write you a letter. I’ve written no one at your office and have no idea what on earth you’re talking about. Who is this? Who really, and what do you want?”

“I have the letter in front of me, Mrs. Donahue.”

I look at it on top of my desk and smooth it open again, being careful and deliberate as it nags at me to ask her about Fielding and why she called him and what he said to her. It nags at me that I don’t want her to hate me or think I’m unfeeling and anything other than honest. It’s possible Fielding disparaged me to her the same way I suspect he did with Julia Gabriel. I’m close to asking, but I stop myself. What has been said, and what has Erica Donahue been led to believe? But not now. Self-control, I tell myself.

Mrs. Donahue asks indignantly, “What does it say that’s supposedly from me?”

“A creamy rag paper with a watermark.” I hold the top sheet of paper up to my desk lamp, adjusting the shade so the bulb shines directly through the paper, showing the watermark clearly, like the inner workings of a soft-shell crab showing through pearly skin. “An open book with three crowns,” I say, and I’m shocked.

I don’t let her hear it in my voice. I make sure she can’t begin to sense what is racing through my mind as I describe to her what I’m seeing, like a hologram, in the sheet of paper I hold up to the light: an open book between two crowns, with a third crown below, and above that three cinquefoil flowers. And it is the flowers Marino neglected to mention that so glaringly aren’t Oxford’s coat of arms, that so glaringly aren’t the coat of arms for the online City University of San Francisco. What I’m looking at isn’t what Benton found on the Internet early this morning while all of us were in the x-ray room, but it’s what I saw on the gold signet ring I took out of the evidence locker before I came upstairs after looking at the dead man’s clothes.

I open the small manila envelope and shake the ring out into the palm of my gloved hand. The gold catches the lamplight and is bright against white cotton as I turn it different ways to look at it, noting it is badly scratched and the bottom of the band is worn thin. The ring looks old, like an antique, to me.

“Well, that sounds like my crest and my paper. I admit it does,” Mrs. Donahue is saying over the phone, and then I read to her the Beacon Hill address engraved on the envelope and letterhead, and she confirms it also is hers. “My personal stationery? How is that possible?” She sounds angry, the way people get when they’re scared.

“What can you tell me about your crest? Would you mind explaining it to me?” I ask.

I look at the identical crest engraved in the yellow-gold signet ring that I now hold under a hand lens. The three crowns and the open book are large in the magnifying glass, and the engraving is almost gone in spots, the five-petal flowers, the cinquefoils especially, just a ghost of what was once deeply etched because of the age of the ring, which has been subjected to wear and tear by someone, or perhaps by a number of people, including the man from Norton’s Woods, who was wearing it on the little finger of his left hand when he was murdered. There can be no mistake he had it on, that the ring came in with his body. There was no mixup by police, a hospital, a funeral home. The ring was there when Marino removed the man’s personal effects yesterday morning and locked them up and kept the key until he turned it over to me.

“My family name is Fraser,” Mrs. Donahue explains. “It’s my family coat of arms, that particular emblazon for Jackson Fraser, a great-grandfather who apparently changed the design to incorporate elements such as Azure in base, a border Or, and a third crown Gules, which you can’t see unless you’re looking at a replica of the coat of arms that displays the tinctures, such as what is framed in my music room. Are you saying someone wrote a letter on my stationery and had a driver hand-deliver it to you? I don’t understand or see how it’s possible, and I don’t know what it means or why someone would do something like that. What kind of car was it? We certainly don’t have a driver. I have an old Mercedes, and my husband drives a Saab and isn’t in the country right now, anyway, and we’ve never had a driver. We only use drivers when we travel.”

“I’m wondering if your family coat of arms is on anything else. Embroidered, engraved, besides being framed on the wall in your music room, anywhere else it might appear. If it’s known or published, if someone could have gotten hold of it.” No matter how I phrase it, it sounds like a peculiar thing to quiz her about.

“Get hold of it to do what ultimately? What goal?”

“Your stationery, for example. Let’s think about that and what the ultimate goal might be.”

“Is what you have engraved or printed?” she then asks. “Can you tell the difference between engraved and printed by looking at what you have?”

You don’t know who he is, I’m thinking. You don’t know that the man who died wearing that ring isn’t a member of her family, a relative, and I remember Benton saying Johnny Donahue has an older brother who works at Langley. What if he happened to be in Cambridge yesterday, staying at an apartment near Harvard, maybe a friend’s apartment that has an obsolete packbot in it, a friend with a greyhound, a friend who perhaps works in a robotics lab? What if the older brother or some other man significant to Mrs. Donahue had just been overseas, in the UK, and had flown back here unexpected and is dead and she doesn’t know, the Donahue family doesn’t know? What does Johnny’s brother look like?

Don’t ask her.

“The stationery is engraved,” I answer Mrs. Donahue’s question.

What if her family is somehow connected with Liam Saltz or with someone who might have attended his daughter’s wedding on Sunday? Might the Donahues have a connection to a member of Parliament named Brown?

Stay away from it.

“Well, you can’t pull engraved stationery out of a hat, have it made in a minute,” Mrs. Donahue is saying.

Now I’m looking at the envelope, at the duct tape on the back that I didn’t cut through, that I thought to preserve.

“Especially if you don’t have the copperplates,” she adds.

We use sticky-sided tape all the time in forensics, to collect trace evidence from carpet, from upholstery, to