Port Mortuary (2010)

to go back. We’re not going to get another sample of his urine, although we can try testing his hair, where the molecules of drugs, including steroids, might have accumulated inside the hair shaft. A test like that would be a long shot for detecting steroids, and it isn’t going to tell us if Wally got them from Fielding or knew Fielding or was murdered by him. But I’m willing to try anything, because as I look around this cellar and see the shape of Fielding’s body under a sheet on the floor, I want to know why. I have to know and won’t accept that he was crazy, that he’d lost his mind. That’s just not good enough.

Returning to the Pelican case near the stairs, I find a pair of knee pads and put them on before kneeling by the rounded blue sheet, and when I pull it back from Jack Fielding’s face, I’m not prepared for how present he looks. That’s the word that comes to mind, present, as if he’s still here, as if he’s asleep but not well. There is nothing vital or vibrant about him, and my brain races through the details I’m seeing, the stiff strands of hair from the gel he used to hide his baldness, the red splotches on his face, which is puffy and pale, and I pull the sheet off, and it rustles as I move it out of my way. I sit back on the heels of my rubber boots and look him over, taking in his gelled sandy-brown hair that was thinning on top and gone in spots, and the dried blood around his ear and pooled under his head.

I imagine Fielding pointing the barrel of the Glock inside his left ear and pulling the trigger. I try to get into his mind, try to conjure up his last thoughts. Why would he do that? Why his ear? The side of the head is common in gunshot suicides, but not the ear, and why his left side and not his right? Fielding was right-handed. I used to tease him about having what I called “extreme handedness” because he couldn’t do anything useful with his left hand, nothing that required any degree of dexterity or skill. He certainly didn’t shoot himself in his left ear while holding the pistol in his right hand, not unless he’d become a contortionist in my absence, and maybe that will be one more speculation everyone will come up with. But I need to check the angle. I point my right finger into my left ear canal as best I can, pretending my index finger is the barrel of the Glock.

“Things really aren’t that bad,” a deep voice says. “It hasn’t come to that, has it?” General John Briggs says.

I look up at him standing over me, his legs spread, his hands behind his back, big and bulky in bright yellow, but he’s not wearing a face shield or gloves or a hard hat, his face ruggedly compelling, hawklike, it’s been described as, and shadowed with stubble. He’s a dark man, and no matter how often he shaves, he always looks as if he needs to, his eyes the same dark gray as the titanium veneer on my building, his black hair thick with very little gray for his age, which is exactly sixty.

“Colonel,” he then says, and he squats next to me and picks up the flashlight I was using earlier and had left upright on the stone floor. “I imagine you’re wondering the same thing I am.” He turns on the light.

“I seriously doubt it,” I reply as he shines the light inside Fielding’s left ear.

“I’m wondering where he was,” Briggs says. “Looking for high-velocity spatter, something to indicate if he was right here? Because why? Was he standing by his cryogenic freezer and just stuck a gun in his ear?”

I take the light from him so I can direct it where I want as I look inside Fielding’s ear, and mostly what I see is dark dried blood that is crusty, but as I lean closer I can make out the small black entrance wound, a contact wound, and that is elongated. It is angled. A large amount of blood is under his head, a dried pool of it that is thick and looks sticky because the cellar is moist, and I smell blood that is beginning to break down, the sweetish foul odor that is faint, and I detect alcohol. It wouldn’t surprise me if Fielding was drinking in the end. Whether he shot himself or someone else did, he probably was compromised, and I remember the big SUV with the xenon lights that tailed Benton and me some sixteen hours ago while we were driving through a blizzard to the CFC. The current assumption is that Fielding was in that SUV, that it was his Navigator and he’d removed the front plate so we couldn’t tell who was behind us.

Nobody has satisfactorily offered why he might have decided to tail Benton and me or how he managed to disappear instantly, seemingly in thin air, after Benton stopped in the middle of the snowy road in hopes whoever was on our bumper would pass us. I seem to be the only one consumed by the fact that Otwahl Technologies is very close to the area where the big SUV with xenon lights and fog lamps vanished, and if someone had a gate opener or code to that place or was familiar to the private police, that person could have tucked the Navigator in there, rather much like vanishing in the Bat Cave, is how I described it to Benton, who didn’t seem impressed. “Why would Jack Fielding have that kind of access to Otwahl?” I asked Benton as we were driving here. “Even if he was involved with some of the people who work there, would he have access to its parking lot? Could he have pulled in so quickly and been confident the private police who patrol the grounds would have been fine with it?”

“With all the white-painted surfaces in here,” Briggs is saying to me, “you’d think we could find something that might indicate where the shooting occurred.”

I look at Fielding’s hands. They are as cold as the stone in the cellar, and he is completely rigorous. As muscle-bound as he is, it is like moving the arms of a marble statue as I shine the flashlight on his thick, strong hands, examining them, noting his clean trimmed nails and surprised by them. I expected them to be dirty, as crazy and out of control as everyone believes he was. I notice his calluses, which he’s always had from using free weights in the gym or working on his cars or doing home repairs. It appears he died holding the pistol in his left hand, or it is supposed to look like he did, his fingers curled tightly and the impression in his palm made by the Glock’s nonslip stippled grip. But I don’t notice a fine mist of blood that might have blown back on his skin when he pulled the trigger. Back spatter is an artifact that can’t be staged or faked.

“We’ll do GSR on his hands,” I comment, and I notice that Fielding isn’t wearing his wedding band. The last time I saw him, he had it on, but that was in August, and he was still living with his family, from what I understand.

“The muzzle of the gun had blood,” Briggs tells me. “Internal muzzle staining from blood being sucked in.”

The phenomenon is caused by explosive gases when the barrel of a gun is pressed against the skin and fired.

“The ejected cartridge case?” I inquire.

“Over there.” He indicates an area of the whitewashed floor about five feet from Fielding’s right knee.

“And the gun? In what position?” I slide my hands under Fielding’s head and feel the hard lump of jagged metal under the scalp above his right ear, where the bullet exited his skull and is trapped under his skin.

“Still gripped in his left hand. I’m sure you noticed the way his fingers are curled and the impression of the grip in his palm. We had to pry the gun out of his hand.”

“I see. So he shot himself with his left hand even though he’s right-handed. Not impossible but unusual, and he either was already lying right here on the floor when he did it or fell with the gun still gripped in his hand. A cadaveric spasm and he clenched it hard. And fell neatly on his back just like this. Well, that’s quite a thing to imagine. You know me and cadaveric spasms, John.”

“They do happen.”

“Like winning the lottery,” I answer. “That happens, too. Just never to me.”

I feel fractured bone shift beneath my fingers as I gently pal-pate Fielding’s head and envision a wound path that is upward and slightly back-to-front, the bullet lodging approximately three inches from the lower angle of his right jaw.

“He shot himself like this?” I turn my left hand into a gun again, and point my purple nitrile-gloved index finger at an awkward angle, as if I’m going to shoot myself in the left ear. “Even if he held the pistol in his left hand when he wasn’t left-handed, it’s slightly awkward and unusual, the way my elbow has to be down and behind me, don’t you think? And I might expect a fine mist of back spatter on his hand. Of course, these things aren’t set in stone,” I say inside Fielding’s white-painted stone cellar.

“Odd thing about shooting yourself in the ear,” I comment, “is people generally are squeamish because of the anticipated noise, not rational, because you’re about to die, anyway, but it’s human nature. Like shooting yourself in the eye. Almost nobody does.”

“You and I need to talk, Kay,” Briggs says.

“And most of all, the timing of when the cryogenic freezer was gone into,” I then say. “And the space heater turned on and what was burned upstairs, possibly Erica Donahue’s stationery. If Jack did all that before he killed himself, then why is there no semen or broken glass on the floor under him?” I am manipulating Fielding’s big body, and he is dead weight, completely stiff and unwilling as I move him a little, looking under him at a floor that is white and clean. “If he came down here and broke all these test tubes and then shot himself in the ear, there should be