referred to the special agent who’s assigned this car as “she” a little while ago while he was telling me about
The reservation was made online by someone using an e-mail address that belongs to Johnny Donahue, an inpatient at McLean with no Internet access when the e-mail was sent yesterday from an IP address that is an Internet cafe near Salem State College, which is very close to here. The credit card used belongs to Erica Donahue, and as far as anybody knows, she doesn’t do anything online and won’t touch a computer. Needless to say, the FBI and the police don’t believe she or her son booked the Bentley or the driver.
The FBI and the police believe Fielding did, that he likely got access to Mrs. Donahue’s credit card information from payments she made to the tae kwon do club for lessons her son took until he was told not to come back after he tried to kick his instructor, my deputy chief, a grandmaster with a seventh-degree black belt. It isn’t clear how Fielding might have gained access to Johnny’s e-mail account unless he somehow manipulated the vulnerable and gullible teenager into giving him the password at some point or learned it by some other means.
The chauffeur, who isn’t suspected of anything except not bothering to research Dr. Scarpetta before he delivered something to her, received the assignment from dispatch, and according to dispatch, no one who works at the elite transportation company ever met the alleged Mrs. Donahue or talked to her over the phone. In the notes section of the online reservation, an “exotic luxury car” was requested for an “errand” with the explanation that further instructions and a letter to be delivered would be dropped off at the private driving company’s headquarters. At approximately six p.m., a manila envelope was slipped through the mail slot in the front door, and some four hours later, the chauffeur showed up at Hanscom Field with it and decided that Benton was me.
We get out into the cold, clean air, and ice is everywhere, lit up by the sun as if we are inside an illuminated crystal chandelier. Shielding my eyes with my hand, I watch the dark-blue sea as it rolls and contracts like muscle, pushing itself inland to smash and boil against a rock-strewn shore where no one lives. Right here a sea captain once looked out at a view that I doubt has changed much in hundreds of years, acres of rugged coastline and beach with copses of hardwood trees, untouched and uninhabitable because it is part of a marine recreational park, which happens to have a boat launch.
A little farther down, past the campground, where the Neck wraps around toward the Salem Harbor, is a yacht yard where Fielding’s twenty-foot Mako was shrink-wrapped and on a jack stand when police found it this morning. I’m vaguely aware he has a dive boat because I’ve heard him mention it, but I didn’t know where he keeps it. I never would have imagined twenty-four hours ago that it might become the focus of a homicide investigation, or that his dark-blue Navigator SUV with its missing front license plate would, or that his Glock pistol with its drilled-off serial number would, or that everything Fielding owns and has done throughout his entire existence would.
Overhead, an orange Dauphin helicopter, an HH-65A, also known as a Dolphin, beats low across the cold, blue sky, its enclosed Fenestron ten-bladed tail rotor making a distinctive modulated sound that is described as low noise but to me has a quiet high pitch, is ominously whiny, reminding me a bit of a C-17. Homeland Security is conducting air surveillance, and I’ve been told that, too. I don’t know why federal law enforcement has taken to the air or the land or the sea unless there is a concern about the overall security of the Salem Harbor, a significant port with a huge power plant. I have heard the word
I continue going back to Otwahl, everything leading me back to Otwahl, my thoughts carried on the wing of a flybot or, as Lucy puts it, not a flybot but the holy grail of flybots. Then I think about my old nemesis MORT, a life- size model of it perched like a giant mechanical insect inside a Cambridge apartment rented by Eli Goldman, and next I worry about the controversial scientist Dr. Liam Saltz, who must be heartbroken beyond remedy. Maybe he simply got caught in one of those ghastly coincidences that happens in life, his tragic misfortune to be the stepfather of a brilliant young man who slipped into bad science, bad drugs, and illegal firearms.
A kid too smart for his own good, as Benton puts it, murdered while wearing an antique signet ring missing from Erica Donahue’s house, just as her stationery is missing, and her typewriter and a fountain pen, items that Fielding must have gotten hold of somehow. He must have gotten his hands on all sorts of things from the rich Harvard student he bullied, Johnny Donahue, and it doesn’t matter if it all feels wrong to me. I can’t prove that Fielding didn’t exchange the gold ring for drugs. I can’t prove he didn’t exchange the Glock for drugs. I can’t say that’s not why Eli had the ring and the gun, that there’s some other reason far more nefarious and dangerous than what Benton and others are proposing.
I can say and have said that Eli Goldman was an obstruction to the mercenary progress of a company like Otwahl, and Otwahl is the common denominator in everything, more so than tae kwon do or Fielding. As far as I’m concerned, if Fielding is as directly and solely responsible as everyone is claiming, then we should be taking a very hard and different look at Otwahl and wonder what he had to do with the place beyond being a user or a research subject or even someone who helped distribute experimental drugs until they brought about his complete annihilation.
“Otwahl and Jack Fielding,” I said to Benton a little while ago. If Fielding is guilty of murder and case- tampering and obstruction of justice and all sorts of lies and conspiracies, then he’s intimately connected with Otwahl, right down to its parking lot, where his Navigator likely got tucked out of sight last night during a blizzard. “You have to make that connection in a meaningful way,” I repeatedly told Benton on our drive to this desolate spot that is achingly beautiful and yet ruined, as if Fielding’s property is an ugly stain on the canvas of an exquisite seascape.
“Otwahl Technologies and an eighteenth-century sea captain’s house on Salem Neck,” I said to my husband, and I asked his opinion, his honest and objective opinion. After all, he should have a very well-informed and completely objective opinion because of his alliance with the well-informed and completely objective
He’s not even listening to me anymore, pretty much checked out when I made the comment a few minutes ago that Fielding must have some link to Otwahl beyond his teaching martial arts to a few brainy students who had internships with the technology behemoth. The connection must be more than just drugs, I said. Drug-impregnated pain-relieving patches can’t be the entire explanation for what I’m about to find inside a tiny stone outbuilding that Fielding was turning into a guest quarters before he supposedly found another use for it that has earned it several new names.
Destined to be Salem’s latest attraction during Halloween, which lasts all of October, with a million people making a pilgrimage here from all over the land. Another example of a place made famous by atrocities that don’t seem real anymore, tall tales, almost cartoonish, like the witch on her broom depicted on the Salem logo that is on police patches and even painted on the police cruiser doors. Be careful what you hate and murder, because one day it will own you. The Witch City, as people have dubbed the place where those men and women were herded up to what is now called Gallows Hill Park, a spot similar to where Fielding bought a sea captain’s house. Places that don’t change much. Places that are now parks. Only Gallows Hill is ugly, and it should be. An open field ravaged by the wind, and barren. Mostly rocks, weeds, and patchy, coarse grass. Nothing grows there.
Thoughts like these are solar flares, and peak and spike with a timing I can’t seem to control, as Benton touches my elbow, then grips it firmly, while we cross the sandy dead-end street that has turned into a parking lot of law-enforcement vehicles, marked and unmarked, some with the Salem logo, silhouettes of witches straddling their brooms. Pulled up close to the sea captain’s house, almost right up against the back of it, is the CFC’s white van-body truck that Marino drove here hours earlier while I was in the autopsy room and then upstairs, having no
