transported, probably by boat, probably by Fielding’s boat, and dumped in the harbor at the coast guard station, an act that Benton describes as brazen, as a taunt to law enforcement. And that doesn’t sound like Fielding, either. For such a fierce muscle-bound grandmaster, he was rather much a coward.
“Thank you. Let’s see what’s needed,” I say to Pruitt.
“Well, you know the DNA that’s needed. Hundreds of samples already, not just the semen that needs to be reconnected with its donor but everything else being swabbed.”
“I know. It’s a huge job and will go on for quite a while because we don’t know what’s happened in here. Just part of it. What was in the freezer and then whatever else was done in addition to what I’m supposing must have been the homicide of the BC student, Wally Jamison.” As I say his name I envision him, square-jawed with curly black hair and bright blue eyes, and powerfully built. Then what he looked like later. “What time did you get here?”
“John and I flew in early, got here about seven hours ago.”
I don’t ask him where Briggs is now.
“He did the external exam and will go over those details with you when you’re ready,” Pruitt adds.
“And nobody had touched him prior to that.” Fielding’s body was discovered shortly after three a.m. Or that’s what I’ve been told.
“When John and I got here, the body was covered just like he is now. The Glock isn’t here. After the FBI restored the eradicated serial number, the gun was bagged and is now at your labs,” Pruitt tells me what Benton did.
“I didn’t know about it until a little while ago. When I was being driven here.”
“Look. If I’d been here at three a.m. and it was up to me?” He starts to say he would have told me everything that was going on. “But the FBI wanted to keep things contained, since no one’s been sure if he was a lone wolf.” He means if Fielding was. “Because of all the other factors, like Dr. Saltz and the MP and so on. The fear of terrorism.”
“Yes. Only not the brand of terrorism the Bureau usually has to worry about. This is a different brand of terrorism,” I comment. “It feels personal. Doesn’t it feel personal? What are you thinking about all this?”
“Nobody had touched the body when the police, the FBI found it.” Pruitt doesn’t want to tell me what he thinks about it. “I do know he was the same temperature as the room by then, had been down here for a while, but you should talk to John about it.”
“You’re saying his body was the same temperature as the ambient air at five a.m.”
“It’s forty degrees, or around that. Maybe a few degrees warmer because of all the people down here. But you need to get the details from John.”
Pruitt stares off at the human-shaped mound draped with a blue sheet on the other side of the cellar, near the freezer, near thawing fluids on the stone floor, where investigators have knee pads on and are collecting one shard of glass at a time and swabbing, and packaging each item separately in paper envelopes that they label with permanent markers. I won’t do the calculations until I check the body, but already what I’m hearing adds to what I suspect. Something is wrong.
21
The stain on the whitewashed wall is an ugly darkness some six feet above the stone floor, probably where Wally Jamison’s head and neck were when he was shackled and beaten and cut to death.
Spraying out from the largest stain are a constellation of pinpoint spatters, tiny black marks that at close inspection are elongated, are angled, the cast-off blood from the weapon as it was repeatedly swung, as it was repeatedly bloodied from impacting with human flesh, and I envision the wood-splitting maul Pruitt mentioned, and I agree with him. What a terrible way to die. Then I think of the injection knife. Another horrendous way to die. Sadism.
“He should have had a system of keeping track of the samples,” I say to Pruitt as I watch the investigators in bright yellow, on their hands and knees, some of them people I don’t know. Maybe St. Hilaire from Salem. Maybe Lester “Lawless” Law from Cambridge. I’m not sure who is here, really, just that the FBI is working in conjunction with a special task force comprising investigators from various departments who are members of the North Eastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council, NEMLEC. “If he really was selling extracted semen,” I continue my train of thought, “I would assume he had a way of logging the specimens.” I direct his attention to bits of gummy labels still adhering to broken glass on the floor. “Finding information like that will help us with identification, maybe preliminarily supply it, and then we can verify through DNA. If all of the specimens came from CFC cases, we should have DNA on blood-spot cards in each case file.”
“I know Marino is looking into that, has somebody pulling every case of young males who would have been viable candidates. Especially if Fielding did the autopsies.”
“With all due respect, that was my direction, not Marino’s.” I hear the defensiveness I can’t keep out of my tone, but I’ve had enough of my new self-appointed acting chief Pete Marino. I’ve had enough references that imply he runs my office.
“We’ve not found a log yet,” Pruitt adds. “But Farinelli’s over there with his laptop, which was as dead as he was when we got here. Maybe the log will be on that.”
It always seems strange when investigators refer to my niece by her last name. Lucy must be next door in the house, where there are no lights or heat, unless the power has come back on. I realize that down here I might not know, since we are using auxiliary lights brought in and set up. I walk over to an open Pelican case near the bottom of the stairs and find a flashlight, then return to the wall to shine the light over bloodstains to see what else they have to tell me before I look at the person who supposedly caused them, my deputy chief, working alone in his Kill Cellar.
Below the darkest area on the whitewashed wall is a corresponding dark area on the whitewashed floor, a myriad of drips that combine into a solid stain, what I can tell was a pool of blood that is almost black and flaking, much of it having soaked into the porous whitewashed stone. Some of the drops at the edge of the large stained area are perfectly round, with only a small amount of distortion or scalloping around the edges from the roughness of the stone, passive spatters from the victim bleeding. Other stains are smeared from someone, possibly the assailant, stepping on them or dragging something over them while they were still wet. Maybe dragging carpet and plyboards over them, I think. The only bloodstains that show a direction of travel are those on the wall and the ceiling, black and elongated or with a teardrop shape, and I believe most of these were projected by the repeated swings and impacts of the weapon.
The victim was upright when he bled, shackled to the wall, it would seem, and what I can’t tell is the timing of at least one blow that I know was fatal. Did it happen early on or later?
Wally Jamison would have lived only minutes after receiving such an injury, and I wonder how long the cutting and beating went on after it was too late to hurt him anymore. I wonder about the rage and what the connection might have been between Wally Jamison and Jack Fielding. It had to be more than that they simply went to the same gym. Wally wasn’t involved in martial arts, and as far as anyone knows, he wasn’t acquainted with Johnny Donahue or Eli Goldman or Mark Bishop. He didn’t work or intern at Otwahl, either, and apparently had nothing to do with robotics or other technologies. What I know about Wally Jamison is that he was from Florida, a senior at BC, where he was majoring in history and somewhat of a celebrity because of football, and a partier, a ladies’ man. I can’t come up with a single reason why Fielding might have known him, unless it was some chance encounter they had, perhaps because of the gym and then perhaps drugs, the hormonal cocktail Benton mentioned.
Wally Jamison’s toxicology was negative for illegal or therapeutic drugs or alcohol, but we don’t routinely test for steroids unless we have reason to suspect a death may be related to them. Wally’s cause of death wasn’t a question. There certainly was no reason to think steroids killed him, at least not directly, and now it may be too late
