idea what was happening some thirty miles northeast. The back of the truck is open, and Marino is inside, wearing green rubber boots and a bright-yellow hard hat and a bright-yellow level-A suit, what we use for demanding jobs that require protection from biological and chemical hazards.
Cables snake over the diamond-steel floor and out the open metal doors, over the unpaved icy drive, and disappear through the front of the stone cottage, what must have been a charming, cozy outbuilding before Fielding turned it into a construction site of exposed foundation blocks, the ground frozen with ice that is gray. The area behind the sea captain’s house is an eyesore of spilled cement and toppled piles of lumber and bricks, and rusting tools, shingles, weather stripping, and nails everywhere. A wheelbarrow is covered loosely with a black tarp that flaps, the entire perimeter strung with yellow crime scene tape that shakes and jumps in the wind.
“We got enough juice in this thing for lights and that’s it, got about a hundred and twenty minutes of run time left,” Marino says to me as he digs inside a built-in storage bin.
What he’s referring to is the auxiliary power unit, the APU, which can keep the truck’s electrical system running while the engine is off and supplies a limited amount of emergency power externally.
“Assuming the power doesn’t come back on, and maybe we’ll get lucky. I’ve heard it could anytime, the main problem being those poles knocked over by snapped-off trees you probably drove past on Derby Street on your way here. But even if we get the electricity back, it won’t help much in there.” He means in the stone outbuilding. “No heat in there. It’s cold as shit, and after a while it gets to you, I’m just telling you,” he says from inside the truck while Benton and I stand outside in the wind and I flip up the collar of my jacket. “Cold as our damn fridge at the morgue, if you can imagine working in there for hours.”
As if I’ve never worked a scene in frigid weather and am unfamiliar with a morgue cooler.
“Course, there are some advantages to that if the power goes out, which it’s going to do in these parts when you get storms, and he didn’t have a backup generator,” Marino continues.
He means that Fielding didn’t.
“And that’s a lot of money to lose if the freezer quits. Which is why plugging in a space heater and turning it on high was for the obvious reason of ruining the DNA so we’d never know who he’d taken the shit from. Do you think that’s possible?” he asks me.
“I’m not sure which part of it—” I start to say.
“That we won’t ID them. Possible we won’t?” Marino continues talking nonstop, as if he’s been drinking coffee since I saw him last. His eyes are bloodshot and glassy.
“No,” I reply. “I don’t think it’s possible. I think we’ll find out.”
“So you don’t think it’s as worthless as tapioca.”
“Christ,” Benton says. “I could have done without that. Christ, I wish you’d stop with the fucking food analogies.”
“Low copy number.” I remind Mario we can get a DNA profile from as little as three human cells. Unless virtually every cell is degraded, we’ll be okay, I assure him.
“Well, it’s only fair we really try.” Marino talks to me as if Benton’s not here, directing his every comment to me as if he’s in charge and doesn’t want to be reminded of my FBI or former FBI husband. “I mean, what if it was your son?”
“I agree we have to ID them and let their next of kin know,” I reply.
“And get sued, now that I think of it,” Marino reconsiders. “Well, maybe we shouldn’t tell anyone. Seems to me we just need to know who it came from. Why tell the families and open a can of worms?”
“Full disclosure,” Benton says ironically, as if he really knows what that is. He is looking at his iPhone, reading something on it, and he adds, “Because a lot of them probably already know. We’re assuming Fielding arranged with them up front to pay for the service he was offering. It’s not possible to hide anything.”
“We’re not going to,” I answer. “We don’t hide things, period.”
“Well, I’ll tell you. I’m thinking we really should install cameras inside our cooler, not just outside in the hall and the bay and certain rooms but actually in there,” Marino says to me, as if it has always been his belief that we should have cameras inside the coolers, probably inside the freezer, too. In fact, he’s never mentioned the idea before now. “I wonder if cameras would work in a cooler….” he is saying.
“They work outdoors. It gets colder in the winter around here than it is in the cooler,” Benton comments dully, barely listening to Marino, who is full of himself, enjoying his role in the drama that has unfolded, and he’s never liked Fielding. I can’t think of a bigger
“Well, we got to do it,” Marino says to me. “Cameras and no more of this shit, of people doing shit they think they can get away with.”
I look behind us at boots and shoes lined up outside the opening that leads into the cottage. The Kill Cottage, the Semen’s Cottage. Some cops are calling it the Little Shop of Horrors.
“Cameras,” I hear Marino as I stare at the stone cottage. “If we had them in the cooler, we’d have it all on tape. Well, hell, maybe it’s a good thing. Shit, imagine if something like that got leaked and ended up on YouTube. Fielding doing that to all these dead bodies. Jesus. I bet you have cameras like that at Dover, though.”
He hands us folded bright-yellow suits like his.
“Dover must have cameras in the coolers, right?” he goes on. “I’m sure DoD would spring for it, and nothing like the present to ask, right? In light of the circumstances, I don’t think anything’s off the table when it comes to beefing up security at our place….”
I realize Marino is still talking to me, but I don’t answer because I’m worrying about what’s in the cab of the truck. I’m suddenly overwhelmed by pity as I stand outside in the cold and wind and glare, my level-A suit folded up and tucked under my arm while Benton is putting his on.
And Marino goes on quite cheerfully, as if this is quite the carnival, “… Like I said, a good thing it’s cold. I can’t imagine working this on one of those ninety-degree days like we used to get in Richmond, where you can wring water out of the air and nothing’s stirring. I mean, what a fucking pig. Don’t even look at the toilet in there; probably the last time it was flushed was when they were still burning witches around here….”
“They were hanged,” I hear myself say.
Marino looks at me with a blank expression on his big face, and his nose and ears are red, the hard hat perched on top of his bald head like the bonnet of a yellow fireplug.
“How’s he doing?” I indicate the cab of the truck and what’s inside it.
“Anne’s a regular Dr. Dolittle. Did you know she wanted to be a vet before she decided to be Madam Curie?” He still says
“I tell you what, though,” he then says to me. “It’s a good thing the heat hadn’t been off in the house more than five, six hours before anybody got here. Dogs like that don’t have much more hair than I do. He’d dug himself under the covers in Fielding’s rat’s nest of a bed and was still shivering like he was having a seizure. Of course, he was scared shitless. All these cops, the FBI storming in with all their tactical gear, the whole nine yards. Not to mention I’ve heard that greyhounds don’t like to be left alone, have what do you call it, separation anxiety.”
He opens another storage bin and hands me a pair of boots, knowing my size without asking.
“How do you know it’s Jack’s bed?” I ask.
“It’s his shit everywhere. Who else’s would it be?”
“We need to be sure of everything.” I’m going to keep saying it. “He was out here in the middle of nowhere. No neighbors, no eyes or ears, the park deserted this time of year. How do you know for a fact he was alone out here? How can you be absolutely certain he didn’t have help?”
“Who? Who the hell would help him do something like this?” Marino looks at me, and I can see it on his big face, what he thinks. I can’t be rational about Fielding. That’s exactly what Marino thinks, probably what everybody thinks.
“We need to keep an open mind,” I reply, then I indicate the cab of the truck again and ask again about the dog.
“He’s fine,” Marino says. “Anne got him something to eat, chicken and rice from that Greek diner in Belmont, made him a nice comfy bed, and the heat’s blasting, feels like an oven, probably sucking up more to keep his skinny ass warm than we’re using in the cellar. You want to meet him?”
He hands us heavy black rubber gloves and disposable nitrile ones, and Benton blows on his hands to warm them as he continues text-messaging and reading whatever is landing on his phone. He doesn’t seem interested in
