Port Mortuary (2010)

glass and semen under his body. It’s all around him but none under him. There’s a shard of glass in his hair.” I pick it out and look at it. “Someone broke all this after he was dead, after he was already lying here on the floor.”

“He could have gotten glass in his hair when he broke test tubes, violently smashed everything,” Briggs says, and he sounds patient and kind for him. He almost seems to feel sorry for me. My insecurities again.

“Do you have your mind made up, John? You and everyone else?” I look up into his compelling face.

“You know damn better than that,” he says. “We have a lot to talk about, and I’d rather not do it here in front of the others. When you’re ready, I’ll be next door.”

The power came back on in Salem Neck at about half past two, about the time I was finishing with Jack Fielding, kneeling next to him on that cold stone floor until my feet started tingling and my knees were aching and burning, despite the pads I had on.

The flush-mounted lights in his old outdated kitchen are illuminated, the house quite chilly but with the promise of warmth in the forced air I feel coming out of floor vents as I walk around in my tactical boots and field clothes and jacket, having taken off my protective gear except for disposable gloves. The white porcelain sink is filled with dishes, and the water is scummy with soap, a coagulated slick of yellowish grease floating on it, and the sheer yellow curtain covering the window over the sink is stained and dingy.

Wherever I look I find remnants of food and garbage and hard drinking and am reminded of the squalor of countless scenes I’ve worked, of their rot and spoilage, their musty mildewy smells, of how often it is that the life preceding the death was the real crime. Fielding’s last months on earth were far more tortured than he deserved, and I can’t accept that he wanted anything he made for himself. This is not what he scripted for his ultimate destiny, it’s not what he was born to, and I continue thinking of that favorite phrase of his when he would remind me he wasn’t born to this or born to that, especially if I asked him to do something he found distasteful or boring.

I pause by a wooden table with two wooden chairs beneath a window that faces the icy street and the choppy dark-blue water beyond it, and the table is deep in old newspapers and magazines that I spread around with my gloved hand. The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Salem News, as recent as Saturday, I note, and I recall seeing several papers covered with ice on the sidewalk in front, as if they were tossed there and no one brought them inside the house before the big storm. There are about half a dozen Men’s Health magazines, and I notice the mailing labels are for Fielding’s Concord address. The January and February issues were forwarded here, as was a lot of other mail in the pile I sift through. I recall that Fielding’s rental of the house in Concord began almost a year ago, and based on the clutter and furniture I recognize as his and what I’ve been told about his domestic problems, it would make sense that he didn’t renew the lease. He relocated to a drafty antique house that is completely lacking in charm because of the run- down condition it’s in, and while I can imagine what he envisioned when he fell in love with the place, something changed for him.

What happened to you? I look around at the squalor he’s left in his wake. Who were you in the end? I envision his dead hands and remember their coldness and their rigor and how heavy they felt as I held them. They were clean, his nails well kempt, and that very small detail doesn’t seem to fit with everything else I’m seeing. Did you make this appalling mess? Or did someone else? Has some other person who is slovenly and crazed been inside your house? But I also know that consistency really is the hobgoblin of little minds, that what Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote is true. People aren’t easily explained or defined, and what they do isn’t always consistent. Fielding may very well have been falling apart along with everything around him but was still vain enough to have good hygiene. It could be true.

But I’m not going to know. His CT scan, his autopsy won’t tell me. There’s so much I won’t know, including why he never told me about his place in Salem. Benton says that Fielding purchased the house right after he moved to Massachusetts, which was a year ago this past January, but he never mentioned it to me. I’m not sure he was hiding anything criminal he was up to or intended to be up to, but rather I have a feeling he wanted something that was just his, something that didn’t concern me and that I had no opinion about and wasn’t going to improve or change or help him with. He didn’t want my mentoring him as he set about to turn an eighteenth-century sea captain’s safe harbor into his own or into an investment or whatever he originally dreamed of having all to himself.

If that’s the truth, then how sad, I think as I look out at water sparkling like sapphires, rolling and crashing against the gray, rocky shore across the icy, sandy street. I walk through a wide opening that once had pocket doors, into a dining room of exposed dark oak beams in a white plaster ceiling that is water-stained, noting that the tarnished brass hanging onion lantern belongs in an entryway, not over the walnut table, which is dusty and surrounded by chairs that don’t match and need new upholstery. I don’t blame Fielding for not wanting me here. I’m too critical, too sure of my goddamn good taste and informed opinions, and it’s no wonder I drove him to distraction. Not just an enabler but also a bad mother when I had no right to even be a good one. It wasn’t my place to be anything to him except a responsible boss, and if he were here I would tell him I’m sorry. I would ask him to forgive me for knowing him and caring, because what help was it? What damn good did I do?

I focus on a disturbed area of dust at one end of the table, where someone was eating or working, perhaps where the Olivetti typewriter was, and the chair in front of it is in better shape than the others. Its faded threadbare red-velvet cushion is intact and probably safe to sit on, and I think about Fielding in here typing. I try to place him at this table with its old casement windows, the view in here a dreary one of the gravel drive, and it’s impossible for me to envision him hunched over in a small chair beneath a hanging lantern, typing a two-page letter over and over on engraved watermarked paper until he had a final version that was flawless.

Fielding and his big, impatient fingers, and he was never much of a typist, was self-taught, what he called “hunt and pick” instead of hunt and peck, and the point of that document supposedly from Erica Donahue is illogical if it came from him. Considering the condition Fielding was in, based on what Benton saw when he met with him last week in my office, it doesn’t seem plausible to me that my deputy chief would have gone to such lengths to set up and frame a Harvard student for Mark Bishop’s homicide. Why would Fielding have killed that six-year-old boy? I don’t buy what Benton says, that Fielding was killing himself as a child when he drove nails into Mark Bishop’s head. Fielding was putting an end to his own childhood of abuse, Benton told me, and I’m not persuaded.

But I have to remind myself that there are many things in life that make sense to the people who are doing them while the rest of us never figure it out. Even when we’re told why, the explanation often doesn’t fit with any template that has rhyme or reason. I pause before a casement window, not quite ready to leave this room and enter the next one, where I can hear Briggs walking around in his desert boots. He is talking to someone on his phone, and I pull out mine to check my text messages and see that there is one from Bryce.

Can U call Evelyn!?

I try her in the trace evidence lab and another microscopist answers, a young scientist named Matthew.

“You anywhere near a computer?” Matthew’s voice, confident and tense with excitement. “Evelyn’s just down the hall in the ladies’ room, but we want to send you something totally weird, and I keep thinking it’s a mistake or like the weirdest contamination ever. You know a hair is about eighty thousand nanometers, right? So imagine something four nanometers, in other words, a hair would be twenty thousand times the diameter of what we found. And it’s not organic, even though the elemental fingerprint is mostly pure carbon, but we’ve also detected trace residues of what appears to be phencyclidine….”

“You found PCP?” I interrupt his breathless talk.

“PCP, angel dust, a really trace amount, just a miniscule amount. Using FTIR. At a magnification of one hundred, just plain ol’ light microscopy, and you can see the granules and a lot of other microscopic debris, especially cotton fibers, on the backing of the pain-relieving patch, okay? Probably some of these granular structures are PCP, maybe Nuprin, Motrin, too, whatever the patch originally was, possibly other chemicals there.”

“Matthew, slow down.”

“Well, at one hundred and fifty thousand X with SEM you’ll see what I’m talking about as big as a bread box, Dr. Scarpetta, what we want to send you.”

“Go ahead, and if nothing else, I’ll go out to the truck and log in. Send PDFs, though, and I’ll try on my iPhone. What are you talking about, exactly?”

“Sort of like buckyballs, like a dumbbell made out of bucky-balls but with legs. It’s definitely manmade, about the size of a strand of DNA, like I said, four nanometers and pure carbon, except for whatever it was meant to deliver. And also traces of polyethylene glycol that we’re conjecturing was the outer coating for what was meant to be delivered.”