Port Mortuary (2010)

the person behind all this is Fielding until I see it for myself. Be strong. You must take care of it. Don’t cry over him or anyone. You can’t.

“What do I need to bring?” I collect my coat off a chair, the tactical jacket from Dover that isn’t nearly warm enough.

“We have everything there,” he says. “Just your credentials in case someone asks.”

Of course they have everything there. Everything and everyone is there except me. I collect my shoulder bag from the back of my door.

“When did you figure it out?” I ask. “Figure it out enough to get warrants to find him? Or however it’s happened?”

“When you discovered the man from Norton’s Woods was a homicide, that changed things, to say the least. Now Fielding was connected to another murder.”

“I don’t see how,” I reply as we walk out together, and I don’t tell Bryce I’m leaving. At the moment I don’t want to face anyone. I’m in no mood to chat or to be cordial or even civilized.

“Because the Glock had disappeared from the firearms lab. I know you haven’t been told about that, and very few people are aware of it,” Benton says.

I remember Lucy’s comments about seeing Morrow in the back parking lot at around ten-thirty yesterday morning, about a half-hour after the pistol was receipted to him in his lab, and he couldn’t be bothered with it, according to Lucy. If she knew about the missing Glock, she withheld that crucial information, and I ask Benton if she deliberately lied by omission to me, the chief, her boss.

“Because she works here,” I say as we wait for the elevator to climb to our floor. It is stuck on the lower level, as if someone is holding open the door down there, what staff members sometimes do when they are loading a lot of things on or off. “She works for me and can’t just keep information from me. She can’t lie to me.”

“She wasn’t aware of it then. Marino and I knew, and we didn’t tell her.”

“And you knew about Jack and Johnny and Mark. About tae kwon do.” I’m sure Benton did. Probably Marino, too.

“We’ve been watching Jack, been looking into it. Yes. Since Mark was murdered last week and I found out Jack taught him and Johnny.”

I think of the photographs missing from Fielding’s office, the tiny holes in the wall from the hanging hooks being removed.

“It began to make sense that Jack took control of certain cases. The Mark Bishop case, for example, even though he hates to do kids,” Benton goes on, looking around, making sure no one is nearby to overhear us. “What a perfect opportunity to cover up your own crimes.”

Or some other person’s crimes, I think. Fielding would be the sort to cover for someone else. He desperately needs to be powerful, to be the hero, and then I remind myself to stop defending him. Don’t unless you have proof. Whatever turns out to be true, I’ll accept it, and it occurs to me that the photographs missing from Fielding’s office might have been group poses. That seems familiar. I can almost envision them. Perhaps of tae kwon do classes. Pictures with Johnny and Mark in them.

I wonder but don’t ask if Benton removed those photographs or if Marino did, as Benton continues to explain that Fielding went to great lengths to manipulate everyone into believing that Johnny Donahue killed Mark Bishop. Fielding used a compromised, vulnerable teenager as a scapegoat, and then Fielding had to escalate his manipulations further after he took out the man from Norton’s Woods. That’s the phrase Benton uses. Took out. Fielding took him out and then heard about the Glock found on the body and realized he’d made a serious tactical error. Everything was falling apart. He was losing it, decompensating like Ted Bundy did right before he was caught, Benton says.

“Jack’s fatal mistake was to stop by the firearms lab yesterday morning and ask Morrow about the Glock,” Benton continues. “A little later it was gone and so was Jack, and that was impulsive and reckless and just damn stupid on his part. It would have been better to let the gun be traced to him and claim it was lost or stolen. Anything would have been better than what he did. It shows how out of control he was to take the damn gun from the lab.”

“You’re saying the Glock the man from Norton’s Woods had is Jack’s.”

“Yes.”

“It’s definitely Jack’s,” I repeat, and the elevator is moving now, making a lot of stops on its way up, and I realize it is lunch-time. Employees heading to the break room or heading out of the building.

“Yes. The dead man has a gun that could be traced to Fielding once acid was used on the drilled-off serial number,” Benton says, and it’s clear to me that he knows who the dead man is.

“That was done. Not here.” I don’t want to think of yet something else done inside my building that I didn’t know.

“Hours ago. At the scene. We took care of the identification right there.”

“The FBI did.”

“It was important to know immediately who the gun was traced to. To confirm our suspicions. Then it came here to the CFC and is safely locked up in the firearms lab. For further examination,” Benton says.

“If Jack is the one who murdered him, he should have realized the problem with the Glock when he first was called about the case on Sunday afternoon,” I reply. “Yet he waited until Monday morning to be concerned about a gun he knew could be traced to him?”

“To avoid suspicion. If he’d started asking the Cambridge police a lot of questions about the Glock prior to the body being transported to the CFC, or demanded that the gun be brought in immediately when the labs were closed, it would have come across as peculiar. Antennas would have gone up. Fielding slept on it and by Monday morning was probably beside himself and planning what he was going to do once the gun was brought in. He would take it and flee. Remember, he hasn’t been exactly rational. It’s important to keep in mind he’s been cognitively impaired by his substance abuse.”

I think about the chronology. I reconstruct Fielding’s steps yesterday morning, based on information from his desk drawer and the indented writing on his call-sheet pad. Shortly after seven a.m. it seems he talked to Julia Gabriel before she called me at Dover, and about a half-hour later he entered the cooler, and minutes after that he told Anne and Ollie the body from Norton’s Woods was inexplicably bloody. It seems more logical to consider it was at this point that Fielding recognized the dead man and realized the Glock he’d heard about from the police would be traced to him. If he didn’t recognize the dead man until Monday morning, then Fielding didn’t kill him, I say to Benton, who replies that Fielding had a motive I couldn’t possibly know about.

The dead man’s stepfather is Liam Saltz, Benton informs me. It was confirmed a little while ago when an FBI agent went to the Charles Hotel and talked to Dr. Saltz and showed him an ID photograph Marino took of the man from Norton’s Woods. He was Eli Goldman, age twenty-two, a graduate student at MIT and an employee at Otwahl Technologies, working on special micro-mechanical projects. The video clips from Eli’s headphones were traced to a webcam site on Otwahl’s server, Benton tells me, but he won’t elaborate on who did the tracing, if Lucy might have.

“He rigged up the headphones himself?” I ask as the elevator finally gets to us and the doors slide open.

“It appears likely. He loved to tinker.”

“And MORT? How did he get that? And what for? More tinkering?” I know I sound cynical.

I know when people have their damn minds made up, and I’m not ready for my mind to be made up. Not one damn thing should be decided this fast.

“A facsimile, a model he made as a boy,” Benton explains. “Based on photographs his stepfather had taken of the real thing when he was lobbying against it some eight or nine years ago when you and Dr. Saltz testified before the Senate subcommittee. Apparently, Eli was making models of robots and inventing things since he was practically in diapers.”

We slowly sink from floor to floor while I ask why Otwahl would hire the stepson of a detractor like Liam Saltz, and I want to know what Otwahl means, because Mrs. Donahue said the name meant something. “O. T. Wahl,” Benton replies. “A play on words, because the last name of the company’s founder is Wahl. On the Wall, as in a fly on the wall, and Eli’s last name isn’t Saltz,” Benton adds, as if I didn’t hear him when he told me it’s Goldman. Eli Goldman. But Otwahl would have done a background check on him, I point out. Certainly they would have known who his step-father is, even if their last names aren’t the same.

“MORT was a long time ago,” Benton says as the elevator doors open on the lower floor. “And I don’t know