anything Marino and I are saying.
“Let me take care of things first,” I tell Marino, because I don’t have it in me at the moment to see an abandoned dog that was left alone in a pitch-dark house with no heat after his master was murdered by the person who stole him. Or so the theory goes.
“Here’s the routine,” Marino then says, grabbing two bright-yellow hard hats and handing them to us. “Over there, where you’ll see plastic tubs for decon.” He points at an area of dirt near a sheet of plywood that serves as the cottage’s front door. “You don’t want to track anything beyond the perimeter. Suits and boots go on and off right over there.”
Lined up next to three plastic tubs filled with water is a bottle of Dawn dish-washing detergent and rows of footwear, the boots and shoes of the people inside, including what I recognize as a pair of tan combat boots, men’s size. Based on what I’m seeing, there are at least eight investigators working the scene, including someone who might be army, someone who might be Briggs. Marino bends over to check the status display on the diamond steel-encased APU in the back of the truck, then thuds down the diamond-steel steps out into the glare and sparkle of ice that coats bare trees as if they have been dipped in glass. Hanging everywhere are long, sharp icicles that remind me of nails and spears.
“So what you can do is put your gear on now,” Marino says for my benefit as Benton wanders off, busy with his phone, communicating with someone and not listening to us.
Marino and I begin walking to the cottage, careful not to slip on ice that is frozen unevenly over rutted dirt and mud and debris that Fielding never cleaned up.
“Leave your shoes here,” Marino tells me, “and if you need to use the facilities or go out for fresh air, just make sure you swish your boots off before you go back in. There’s a lot of shit in there you don’t want to be tracking everywhere. We don’t even know exactly what shit, could be shit we don’t know about, my point is. But what we do know isn’t something you want to be tracking all over, and I know they say the AIDS virus can’t live very long postmortem or whatever, but don’t ask me to find out.”
“What’s been done?” I unfold my suit, and the wind almost blows it out of my hands.
“Things you’re not going to want to do and shouldn’t be your problem.” Marino works his huge hands into a pair of purple gloves.
“I’ll do anything that needs to be done,” I remind him.
“You’re going to need your heavy rubber gloves if you start touching a lot of stuff in there.” Marino puts those on next.
I feel like snapping at him that I’m not here to sightsee. Of course I’ll be touching things. But I don’t intend to stoop to saying I’ve shown up to work a crime scene as if I’m one of the troops reporting to Marino and will be saluting him next. It’s not that I don’t understand what Marino is doing, what Benton is doing, what everyone is doing. Nobody wants me guilty of the very thing Mrs. Donahue accused Fielding of, ironically. Not that I want to have a conflict, either, and I understand I shouldn’t be the one examining someone who worked for me and who, as rumor has it, I had sex with at some point in my life.
What I don’t understand is why I’m not bothered more than I am. The only sadness I’m aware of right now is what I feel about a dog named Sock who is sleeping on towels in the cab of the CFC truck. If I see the dog I’m afraid I’ll break down, and every other thought is an anxious one about him. Where will he go? Not to an animal shelter. I won’t allow that. It would make sense if Liam Saltz took him, but he lives in England, and how would he get the dog back to the UK unless it is in the cargo area of a jet, and I won’t permit that, either. The pitiful creature has been through enough in this life.
“Just be careful.” Marino continues his briefing as if I don’t know a damn thing about what is going on around here. “And just so you know, we got the van making runs back and forth like clockwork.”
Yes, I know. I’m the one who set it up. I watch Benton wander back toward the truck, talking to someone on his phone, and I feel forgotten. I feel extraneous. I feel I’m not helpful or of interest to anything or anyone.
“Pretty much nonstop, already thirty or forty DNA samples in the works, a lot of it not completely thawed, so maybe you’re right and we’ll be lucky. The van makes an evidence run and then turns around and comes right back, is on its way back here now even as we speak,” Marino says.
I bend over and untie one of my boots.
“Anne drives like a damn demon. I didn’t know that. I always figured she’d drive like an old lady, but she’s been sliding in and out of here like the damn thing’s on skis. It’s something,” Marino says, as if he likes her. “Anyway, everybody’s working like Santa’s helpers. The general says he can bring in backup scientists from Dover. You sure?”
At the moment I don’t know what I want, except a chance to evaluate the situation for myself, and I’ve made that clear.
“It’s not your decision,” I answer Marino, untying my other boot. “I’ll handle it.”
“Seems like it would be helpful to have AFDIL.” Marino says it in a way that makes me suspicious, and I eye the tan combat boots by the decon tubs.
It’s awkward enough that Briggs is here, and it enters my mind that he might not be the only one who’s shown up from Dover.
“Who else?” I ask Marino as I lean against cinderblocks for balance. “Rockman or Pruitt?”
“Well, Colonel Pruitt.”
Another army man, Pruitt is the director of the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, AFDIL.
“He and the general flew in together,” Marino adds.
I didn’t ask either of them to come, but they didn’t need me to ask, and besides, Marino asked, at least he admitted to inviting Briggs. Marino told me about it during the drive here, over the phone. He said by the way he hoped I didn’t mind that he took the liberty, especially since Briggs supposedly had been calling and I supposedly hadn’t been answering, so Briggs hunted down Marino. Briggs wanted to know about Eli, the man from Norton’s Woods, and Marino told him what was known about the case and then told him “everything else,” Marino informed me, and he hoped I didn’t mind.
I replied that I did mind, but what’s done is done. I seem to be saying that a lot, and I said as much to Marino while I was on the phone with him during the car ride here. I said certain things were done because Marino had done them, and I can’t run an office like that, although what was implicit but not stated was that Briggs is here for that very reason. He’s here because I can’t run an office. Not like that. Not at all. If I could run the CFC as the government and MIT and Harvard and everyone expected, nobody would be working this crime scene, because it wouldn’t exist.
My yellow suit is stiff and digs into my chin as I pull my green rubber boots on, and Marino moves the makeshift plyboard door out of the way. Behind it is a wide sheet of heavy translucent plastic nailed to the top of the door frame, hanging like a curtain.
“Just so we’re clear, I’m maintaining the chain of custody,” I tell him the same thing I said earlier. “We’re doing this the way we always do it.”
“If you say so.”
“I do say so.”
I have a right to say so. Briggs isn’t above the law. He has to honor jurisdiction, and for better or for worse, this case is the jurisdiction of Massachusetts and the principalities where the crimes have occurred.
“I just think any help we can get…” Marino says.
“I know what you think.”
“Look, it’s not like there’s going to be a trial,” he then says. “Fielding saved the Commonwealth a lot of fucking money.”
20
The air is heavy with the smell of wood smoke, and I notice that the fireplace in the far wall is crammed with partially burned pieces of lumber topped by billowy clouds of whitish-gray ash, delicate, as if spun by a spider, but in layers. Something clean-burning, like cotton cloth, I think, or an expensive grade of paper that doesn’t have a high
