cooler, and then he recognized Eli Goldman because they had a connection somehow. Maybe it was drugs, and that’s why Eli had one of Fielding’s guns. Maybe Fielding had given or sold the Glock to Eli. For sure someone did. Drugs, the gun, maybe something else. If only I could have been in Fielding’s mind when he walked into the cooler at shortly after seven yesterday morning. Then I would know. I would know everything.
I move a hanging light out of my way so it doesn’t knock my hard hat as I go down stone steps in my bulky yellow suit and big rubber boots.
A cold sweat is rolling down my sides, and I am worrying about Briggs and what it will be like when I’m confronted with him, and I’m worrying about a greyhound named Sock. I am worrying about everything I can possibly worry about because I can’t bear what I’m about to see, but it is better this way, and as much as I complain about Marino, he really did do the right thing. I wouldn’t have wanted Fielding’s body transported to the CFC. I wouldn’t want to see it for the first time in a pouch on a steel gurney or tray. Marino knows me well enough to decide that given the choice, I would demand to see Fielding the way he died, to satisfy myself that it was exactly as it appears, and that what Briggs determined when he examined the body hours earlier is the same thing I observe and that Briggs and I share the same opinion about Fielding’s cause and manner of death.
The cellar is whitewashed stone with a vaulted stone ceiling and no windows, and it is too small a space for so many people, all of them dressed the way I am, in bright yellow with thick black gloves and green rubber boots and bright yellow hard hats. Some people have on face shields, others surgical masks, and I recognize my own scientists, three from the DNA lab, who are swabbing an area of the stone floor that is littered with shattered glass test tubes and their black plastic stoppers. Nearby is the space heater Marino mentioned, and an upright stainless- steel laboratory cryogenic freezer, the same make and model that we use in labs where we have to store biological samples at ultra-low temperatures.
The freezer door is open wide, the adjustable shelves inside empty because someone, presumably Fielding, removed all the specimens and smashed them to the stone floor, then turned on the space heater. I notice partial labels adhering to glass fragments on a floor that is otherwise clean, the cellar appearing whitewashed with something nonglossy, like primer, like a wine-maker’s cave that has been turned into a laboratory with a steel sink and steel countertop, and racks for test tubes, large steel tanks of liquid nitrogen, and central to the main room I’m in, a long metal table that Fielding probably was using for shipping, and several chairs, one of them pulled out a little, as if someone might have been sitting in it. I look at the chair first, and I look for blood, but I don’t see any.
The table is covered with white butcher paper, and arranged on it are pairs of elbow-length bright-blue cryogloves, ampoules, rollerbases, smudge-proof pens, and long corks and measuring sticks for storage canisters, and stacked underneath are white cardboard boxes called CryoCubes, which are inexpensive vapor shippers we typically use for sending biological materials that are placed inside an aluminum canister, where they can remain frozen at minus-one-hundred-and-fifty degrees centigrade for up to five days. These special packing containers can also be used to ship frozen semen, and in fact are often referred to as “semen tanks” and are favored by animal breeders.
I can only assume that Fielding’s equipment and materials for his illegal and outrageous cottage industry were purloined from the CFC, that in the dark of night or after hours, he somehow managed to sneak what he wanted out of the labs without security batting an eye. Or it is possible he simply ordered what he needed and charged it to us but had it shipped directly here, to the sea captain’s house. Even as I’m piecing together what he might have done, he is so close to me I could touch him, under a disposable blue sheet on his clean white primer- painted floor that is stained with blood at one edge of the plasticized paper, a spot of blood that is part of a large pool under his head, based on what I know. From where I’m standing, I can see the blood has begun to separate and coagulate, is in the early stages of decomposition, a process that would have been dramatically slowed because of the ambient temperature in the cellar. It is cold enough to see your breath, as cold as a morgue refrigerator.
The flashgun of a camera goes off, and then goes off again as a broad-shouldered figure in blaze yellow photographs the one area of whitewashed wall down here that is blackened and foul, where a total station on a bright yellow tripod has been set up, and I’m guessing the electro-optical distance-measuring system has already mapped the scene, recording the coordinate data of every feature, including what Colonel Pruitt is photographing. He catches me looking at him and lowers the camera to his side as I walk over to a wall where I smell death, the faintest musty pungent stench of blood that has broken down and dried over months in a sunless, cold environment. I smell mildew. I smell dust, and I notice piles of torn dirty carpet and plywood nearby against a different wall, and I can tell by dust and dirt on the white floor that the carpet and wood was recently dragged to where it is.
Bolted into stone at the height of my head are a series of steel screw pin anchor shackles that I associate with sling assemblies used in hoisting. Based on coils of rope, grease guns, clamps, a cargo trolley, and grab hooks and swivel rings in the ceiling, I surmise that Fielding devised a creative rig for changing out the heavy tanks of liquid nitrogen, and at some point the system was perverted into one I suspect he never intended when he began extracting semen and selling it.
“From what I’m able to figure out so far, the main thing used was the splitting maul, which would account for both the blunt-force and cutting injuries,” Pruitt begins without so much as hello, as if our meeting here is normal, nothing more than a continuum of our time together at Dover. “Basically, a long-handled sledgehammer on one side, the other side sharp like an ax. It was under carpet and wood, along with a Boston College letter jacket, a pair of sneakers, other items of clothing that we think were Wally Jamison’s. This entire area was under that stuff over there.” He indicates the carpet and wood that was moved, what I surmise was used to cover the crime scene. “All of it, including the splitting maul, of course, has been packaged and sent to your place already. Did you see the weapon yet?” Pruitt says, shaking his head.
“No.”
“Can’t imagine someone coming after me with something like that. Jesus. Shades of Lizzie Borden. And pieces of bloody rope from being strung up.” He points to the shackles and rings bolted into stone that is crusty and black with old blood, and I almost imagine I can smell fear down here, the unimaginable terror of the football player tortured and murdered on Halloween.
“Why didn’t he clean this up?” I ask the first question that comes to mind as I look at a scene that doesn’t appear to have been touched after Wally Jamison was brutally and sadistically murdered down here.
“I guess he took the path of least resistance and just covered everything up with plyboard and old carpet,” Pruitt replies. “That’s why there’s a lot of dirt and fibers everywhere. Appears after the homicide, he didn’t bother washing things down at all. Just heaped old carpet on top and leaned all these boards against the wall.” He points again to the pile of old torn carpet of different colors, and near it, the large sheets of plyboard stacked on the white floor near a closed access door that leads outside the cellar.
“I don’t know why he wouldn’t have washed it down,” I repeat. “That was three months ago. He just left a crime scene, practically left it like a time capsule? Just threw carpet and plyboard over it?”
“One theory is he got off on it. Like people who photograph or film what they do so they can continue getting off on it after the fact. Every time he came down here, he knew what was behind the boards and carpet, what was hidden under them, and got off on it.”
“Some of us can help you with this, you know,” Pruitt then says, looking at me through a plastic face shield that clouds up intermittently as he breathes the cold cellar air. His hazel eyes are alert and friendly as they look at me, but he is troubled. How could anybody not be, and I wonder if he senses what I do. I wonder if he has a feeling in his gut that something is wrong with all this. I wonder if he’s asking the question I am right now as I look at the blackened whitewashed wall with the rusting shackles bolted into the stone.
Extracting semen to sell to bereft families is almost understandable. One can easily blame greed or even a lust for the gratification, the power he must have felt when he was able to give back life where it had been taken. But as I envision the photographs, video recordings, and CT scans I’ve seen of Wally Jamison’s mutilated body, I’m reminded of what went through my thoughts at the time. His murder seemed sexually and emotionally driven, as if the person who swung the weapon at him had feelings for him, certainly had a rage that didn’t quit until Wally was lacerated, sliced, cut, and contused beyond recognition and bled to death. Afterward, his nude body was
