wood-pulp content.
Whoever built the fire did so with the flue closed, and the assumption is that Fielding did, but no one seems quite sure why, unless he was out of his mind or hoping that eventually his Little Shop of Horrors would burn to the ground. But if that was his intention, he certainly didn’t go about it in the right way, and I make a mental note of a gas can in a corner and cans of paint thinner and rags and piles of lumber. Everywhere I look I see an opportunity for starting a conflagration easily, so the fireplace makes no sense unless he was too deranged in the end to think clearly or wasn’t trying to burn down the building but to get rid of something, perhaps to destroy evidence. Or someone was.
I look around in the uneven, harsh illumination of temporary low-voltage extension lights hanging from hooks and mounted on poles, their bulbs enclosed in cages. Strewn over an old scarred paint-spattered workbench are hand tools, clamps, drill bits, paint-brushes, plastic buckets of L-shaped flooring nails and screws, and power tools, such as a drill with screwdriver attachments, a circular saw, a finishing sander, and a lathe on a metal stand. Metal shavings, some of them shiny, and sawdust are on the bench and the concrete floor, everything filthy and rusting, with nothing protecting Fielding’s investment in home improvement from the sea air and the weather but heavy plastic and more plyboard stapled and nailed over windows. Across the room is another doorway that is wide open, and I can hear voices and other sounds drifting up from stairs leading down into the cellar.
“What have you collected in here?” I ask Marino as I look around and imagine what I saw under the microscope. If I could magnify samples from Fielding’s work space, I suspect I would see a rubbish dump of rust, fibers, molds, dirt, and insect parts.
“Well, it’s obvious when you look at the metal shavings some of them are recent because they haven’t started rusting and are really shiny,” Marino replies. “So we got samples, and they’ve gone to the labs to find out if under the scope they look anything like what you found in Eli Saltz’s body.”
“His last name isn’t Saltz,” I remind him for the umpteenth time.
“You know, to compare tool marks,” Marino says. “Not that there’s much of a reason to doubt what Fielding did. We found the box.”
The box the WASP came in.
“A couple spent CO-two cartridges, a couple extra handles, even the instruction book,” Marino goes on. “The whole nine yards. According to the company, Jack ordered it two years ago. Maybe because of his scuba diving.” He shrugs his big shoulders in his big yellow suit. “Don’t know, except he didn’t order it two years ago to kill Eli. That’s for damn sure, and two years ago Jack was in Chicago, and I guess you might ask what he needed a WASP for.” Marino walks around in his big green boots and keeps looking at the opening to the stairs leading down, as if he’s curious about what’s being said and done down there. “The only thing that will kill you in the Great Lakes that I know of is all the mercury in the fish.”
“It’s with us. We have the box and the CO-two cartridges. We have all of it.” I want to know which labs. I want to make sure Briggs isn’t sending my evidence to the AFME labs in Dover.
“Yeah, all that stuff. Except the knife that was in the box, the WASP itself. It still hasn’t shown up. My guess is he ditched it after stabbing the guy, maybe threw if off a bridge or something. No wonder he didn’t want anyone going to the Norton’s Woods scene, right?” Marino’s bloodshot eyes look at me, then distractedly look around, the way people act when nothing they are looking at is new. He’d been here many hours before I showed up.
“What about in here?” I squat in front of the fireplace, which is open and built of old firebrick that is probably original to the building. “What’s been done here?” My hard hat keeps slipping over my eyes, and I take it off and set it on the floor.
“What about it?” Marino watches me from where he’s standing.
I move my gloved finger toward the whitish ashes, and they are weightless, lifting and stirring as the air moves, as if my thoughts are moving them. I contemplate the best way to preserve what I’m seeing, the ashes much too fragile to move in toto, and I’m pretty sure I recognize what has happened in the fireplace, or at least some of what occurred. I’ve seen this before but not recently, maybe not in at least ten years. When documents are burned these days, usually they were printed, not typed, and were generated on inexpensive copying paper with a high wood-pulp content that combusts incompletely, creating a lot of black sooty ash. Paper with a high cotton-rag content has a completely different appearance when it is burned, and what comes to mind immediately is Erica Donahue’s letter that she claims she never wrote.
“What I recommend,” I say to Marino, “is we cover the fireplace so the ashes aren’t disturbed. We need to photograph them in situ before disturbing them in any way. So let’s do that before we collect them in paint cans for the documents lab.”
His big booted feet move closer, and he says, “What for?”
What he’s really asking is why I am acting like a crime scene investigator. My answer, should I give one, which I won’t, is because somebody has to.
“Let’s finish this the way it should be done, the way we know how and have always done things.” I meet his glassy stare, and what I’m really saying is nothing is over. I don’t care what everyone assumes. It’s not over until it is.
“Let’s see what you’ve got.” He squats next to me, our yellow suits making a plastic sound as we move around, and their faint odor reminds me of a new shower curtain.
“Typed characters on the ash.” I point, and the ashes stir again.
“Now you’re a psychic and ought to get a job in one of the magic shops around here if you can read something that’s been burned.”
“You can read some of it because the expensive paper burns clean, turns white, and the inked characters made by a typewriter can be seen. We’ve looked at things like this before, Marino. Just not in a long time. Do you see what I’m looking at?” I point, and the air moves and the ashes stir some more. “You can actually see the inked engraving of her letterhead, or part of it. Boston and part of the zip code. The same zip code on the letter I got from Mrs. Donahue, although she says she didn’t write it and her typewriter is missing.”
“Well, there’s one in the house. A green one, an old portable on the dining-room table.” He gets up and bends his legs as if his knees ache.
“There’s a green typewriter next door?”
“I figured Benton told you.”
“I guess he couldn’t tell me everything in an hour.”
“Don’t get pissed. He probably couldn’t. You won’t believe all the shit next door. Appears when Fielding moved here he never really moved his shit in. Boxes everywhere. A fucking landfill over there.”
“I doubt he had a portable typewriter. I doubt that’s his.”
“Unless he was in cahoots with the Donahue kid. That’s the theory of where a lot of shit has come from.”
“Not according to his mother. Johnny disliked Jack. So how does it make sense that Jack would have Mrs. Donahue’s typewriter?”
“If it’s hers. We don’t know it is. And then there’s the drugs,” Marino says. “Obviously, Johnny’s been on them since about the time he started taking tae kwon do lessons from Fielding. One plus one equals two, right?”
“We’re going to find out what adds up and what doesn’t. What about stationery or paper?”
“Didn’t see any.”
“Except what seems to be in here.” I remind him it appears some of Erica Donahue’s stationery might have been burned, or maybe all of it was, whatever was left over from the letter someone wrote to me, pretending to be her.
“Listen…” Marino doesn’t finish what he’s about to say.
He doesn’t need to. I know what he’s going to say. He’s going to remind me I can’t be reasonable about Fielding, and Marino thinks he should know, all right. Because of our own history. Marino was around in the early days, too. He remembers when Fielding was my forensic pathology fellow in Richmond, my protege, and in the minds of a lot of people, it seems, a lot more than that.
“This was here just like this?” I then ask, indicating a roll of lead-gray duct tape on the workbench.
“Okay. Sure,” he says as he squats by an open crime scene case on the floor and gets out an evidence bag, because the roll of tape can be fracture-matched to the last strip torn off it. “So tell me how the hell he might have gotten hold of it, and what for?”
