Port Mortuary (36 page)

As my secretary Rose used to say when she’d walk in with my latest effort typed on that damn machine,
“And on what page is this in Strunk and White, or maybe it’s in the MLA style guide and I just can’t find it? I’ll redo it, but every time you type something yourself?”
And she’d flap her hand in that characteristic gesture of hers that said to me
Why bother?,
and then I stop those thoughts because it makes me sad when I think about her. I’ve missed Rose every day since she died, and if she were here right now, somehow things would be different. Things would feel different, if nothing else. For me she was my clarity. For her I was her life. No one like Rose should be gone from this earth, and I still can’t believe it, and now is not a good time to think about the blond young man in black high-top sneakers sitting next door instead of her. I need to focus. Focus on Erica Donahue. What will I do with this woman? I am going to do something, but I must be shrewd.

She must have typed her letter to me more than once, as many times as it took to make it impeccable, and I’m reminded that when her driver rolled up in the Bentley he didn’t seem to know that the intended recipient of the envelope sealed with duct tape is a woman, and indeed seemed to think a silver-haired man was me. I remind myself that the mother of Johnny Donahue also doesn’t seem aware that the forensic psychologist evaluating him, this same silver-haired man, is my husband, and also contrary to what’s in her letter, there is no unit for the “criminally insane” at McLean, nor has anyone deemed that Johnny is criminally insane, which is a legal term and not a diagnosis. According to Benton, she also has other facts wrong.

She has confused details that may very well hurt her son, possibly damaging an alibi that potentially is his strongest. Claiming he left The Biscuit in Cambridge at one p.m. instead of at two, as Johnny maintains, she has made it far more believable that he could have found transportation and gotten to Salem in time to kill Mark Bishop around four that afternoon. Then there is her reference to her son reading horror novels and enjoying horror films and violent entertainment, and finally what she said about Jack Fielding and a nail gun and a Satanic cult, none of that correct or proven.

Where did she get those dangerous details—where, really? I suppose Fielding could have put such ideas in her head when he talked to her on the phone, if it’s true he’s the one now spreading these rumors, that he’s lying, which is what Benton seems to think. Regardless of what Fielding did or didn’t do or his truths or untruths or his reasons for anything that is happening, my questions come back to the mother of Johnny Donahue. I make myself bring all of it back to her, because what I fail to see is motivation that is logical. Her delivering this letter to me really doesn’t sit well at all. It feels off. It feels wrong.

For one so meticulous about typos and sentence construction, not to mention the attention she must pay to her music, it strikes me that she doesn’t seem to care nearly as much as she should about the facts of her son’s confession to one of the most heinous acts of violence in recent memory. Every detail counts in a case like this, and how could an intelligent, sophisticated woman with expensive lawyers not know that? Why would she take the chance of divulging anything to someone like me, a complete stranger, especially in writing, when her son faces being locked up for the rest of his life in a forensic psychiatric facility like Bridgewater or, worse, in a prison, where a convicted child-killer with Asperger’s, a so-called savant who can work the most difficult math problems in his head but is impaired when it comes to everyday social cues, isn’t likely to survive very long?

I refresh myself on all these facts and relevant points at the same time I realize I’m feeling and behaving as if they matter to me. And they shouldn’t. I’m supposed to be objective.
You don’t take sides, and it’s not your job to care,
I tell myself.
You don’t care about Johnny Donahue or his mother one way or other, and you’re not a detective or the FBI,
I think sternly.
You’re not Johnny’s defense attorney or his therapist, and there’s nothing for you to get involved in,
I then say to myself severely, because I don’t feel convinced. I’m struggling with impulses that have become impossibly strong, and I’m not sure how to turn them off or if I can or should. I do know I don’t want to.

Some of what I’ve grown accustomed to not only at Dover but on non-combat-related matters that are the jurisdiction of the AFME or what basically is the federal medical examiner is far too compatible with my true nature, and I don’t want to go back to the staid old way of doing things. I’m military and I’m not. I’m civilian and I’m not. I’ve been in and out of Washington and lived on an air force base and routinely been sent on recovery missions of air crashes and accidents during training exercises and deaths on military installations or fatalities involving special forces, the Secret Service, a federal judge, even an astronaut in recent months, handling a multitude of sensitive situations I can’t talk about. What I’m feeling is the
not
part of the equation. I’m not any one thing, and I’m not feeling at all inclined to surrender to limitations, to sit on my hands because something isn’t my department.

As an officer involved in medical intelligence, I’m expected to investigate certain aspects of life and death that go far beyond the usual clinical determinations. Materials I remove from bodies, the types of injuries and wound ballistics, the strengths and failures of armor, and infections, diseases, lesions, whether from parasites or sand fleas, and extreme heat, dehydration, and boredom, depression, and drugs are all matters of national defense and security. The data I gather aren’t just for the sake of families and usually aren’t destined for criminal court but can have a bearing on the strategies of war and what keeps us safe domestically. I’m expected to ask questions. I’m expected to follow leads. I’m expected to pass along information to the surgeon general, the Department of Defense, to be intensely industrious and proactive.

You’re home now. You don’t want to come across as a colonel or a commander, certainly not as a prima donna
.
You don’t want to get a case
null prossed
or thrown out of court. You don’t want to cause trouble. Isn’t there enough already? Why would you encourage more? Briggs doesn’t want you here. Be careful you don’t justify his position. Your own staff doesn’t seem to want you here or know you’re here. Don’t make it easy for you not to be. Your only legitimate purpose in contacting Erica Donahue is to ask her kindly not to contact you or your office again, for her own good, for her own protection.
I decide to use those exact words, and I almost believe my motivation as I call the home phone number typed at the end of her letter.

T
he person who answers doesn’t seem to understand what I’m saying, and I have to repeat myself twice, explaining that I’m Dr. Kay Scarpetta and I’m responding to a letter I just received from Erica Donahue, and is she available, please?

“I beg your pardon,” the well-modulated voice says. “Who is this?” A woman’s voice, I’m fairly sure, although it is low, almost in the tenor range, and could belong to a young man. In the background a piano plays, unaccompanied, a solo.

“Is this Mrs. Donahue?” I’m already getting an uncomfortable feeling.

“Who is this, and why are you calling?” The voice hardens and enunciates crisply.

I repeat what I said as I recognize a Chopin etude, and I remember a concert at Carnegie Hall. Mikhail Pletnev, who was stunning in his technical mastering of a composition that is very hard to play. The music of someone detailed and meticulous who likes everything just so. Someone who isn’t careless and doesn’t make mistakes. Someone who wouldn’t mar a fine engraved envelope by slapping on duct tape. Someone who isn’t impulsive but very studied.

“Well, I don’t know who this really is,” says the voice, what I now believe is Mrs. Donahue’s voice, stony and edged with distrust and pain. “And I don’t know how you got this number, since it’s unlisted and unpublished. If this is some sort of crank call, it’s absolutely outrageous, and whoever you are, you should be ashamed of yourself—”

“I assure you this is not a crank call,” I interrupt before she can hang up on me as I think about her listening to Chopin, Beethoven, Schumann, worrying her life away, agonizing over a son who probably has caused her anguish since she gave birth to him. “I’m the director of the Cambridge Forensic Center, the chief medical examiner of Massachusetts,” I explain authoritatively but calmly, the same voice I use with families who are on the verge of losing control, as if she is Julia Gabriel and about to shriek at me. “I’ve been out of town, and when I arrived at the airport last night, your driver was there with your letter, which I’ve carefully read.”

“That’s absolutely impossible. I don’t have a driver, and I didn’t write you a letter. I’ve written no one at your office and have no idea what on earth you’re talking about. Who is this? Who really, and what do you want?”

“I have the letter in front of me, Mrs. Donahue.”

I look at it on top of my desk and smooth it open again, being careful and deliberate as it nags at me to ask her about Fielding and why she called him and what he said to her. It nags at me that I don’t want her to hate me or think I’m unfeeling and anything other than honest. It’s possible Fielding disparaged me to her the same way I suspect he did with Julia Gabriel. I’m close to asking, but I stop myself. What has been said, and what has Erica Donahue been led to believe? But not now.
Self-control,
I tell myself.

Mrs. Donahue asks indignantly, “What does it say that’s supposedly from me?”

“A creamy rag paper with a watermark.” I hold the top sheet of paper up to my desk lamp, adjusting the shade so the bulb shines directly through the paper, showing the watermark clearly, like the inner workings of a soft-shell crab showing through pearly skin. “An open book with three crowns,” I say, and I’m shocked.

I don’t let her hear it in my voice. I make sure she can’t begin to sense what is racing through my mind as I describe to her what I’m seeing, like a hologram, in the sheet of paper I hold up to the light: an open book between two crowns, with a third crown below, and above that three cinquefoil flowers. And it is the flowers Marino neglected to mention that so glaringly aren’t Oxford’s coat of arms, that so glaringly aren’t the coat of arms for the online City University of San Francisco. What I’m looking at isn’t what Benton found on the Internet early this morning while all of us were in the x-ray room, but it’s what I saw on the gold signet ring I took out of the evidence locker before I came upstairs after looking at the dead man’s clothes.

I open the small manila envelope and shake the ring out into the palm of my gloved hand. The gold catches the lamplight and is bright against white cotton as I turn it different ways to look at it, noting it is badly scratched and the bottom of the band is worn thin. The ring looks old, like an antique, to me.

“Well, that sounds like my crest and my paper. I admit it does,” Mrs. Donahue is saying over the phone, and then I read to her the Beacon Hill address engraved on the envelope and letterhead, and she confirms it also is hers. “My personal stationery? How is that possible?” She sounds angry, the way people get when they’re scared.

“What can you tell me about your crest? Would you mind explaining it to me?” I ask.

I look at the identical crest engraved in the yellow-gold signet ring that I now hold under a hand lens. The three crowns and the open book are large in the magnifying glass, and the engraving is almost gone in spots, the five-petal flowers, the cinquefoils especially, just a ghost of what was once deeply etched because of the age of the ring, which has been subjected to wear and tear by someone, or perhaps by a number of people, including the man from Norton’s Woods, who was wearing it on the little finger of his left hand when he was murdered. There can be no mistake he had it on, that the ring came in with his body. There was no mixup by police, a hospital, a funeral home. The ring was there when Marino removed the man’s personal effects yesterday morning and locked them up and kept the key until he turned it over to me.

“My family name is Fraser,” Mrs. Donahue explains. “It’s my family coat of arms, that particular emblazon for Jackson Fraser, a great-grandfather who apparently changed the design to incorporate elements such as Azure in base, a border Or, and a third crown Gules, which you can’t see unless you’re looking at a replica of the coat of arms that displays the tinctures, such as what is framed in my music room. Are you saying someone wrote a letter on my stationery and had a driver hand-deliver it to you? I don’t understand or see how it’s possible, and I don’t know what it means or why someone would do something like that. What kind of car was it? We certainly don’t have a driver. I have an old Mercedes, and my husband drives a Saab and isn’t in the country right now, anyway, and we’ve never had a driver. We only use drivers when we travel.”

“I’m wondering if your family coat of arms is on anything else. Embroidered, engraved, besides being framed on the wall in your music room, anywhere else it might appear. If it’s known or published, if someone could have gotten hold of it.” No matter how I phrase it, it sounds like a peculiar thing to quiz her about.

“Get hold of it to do what ultimately? What goal?”

“Your stationery, for example. Let’s think about that and what the ultimate goal might be.”

“Is what you have engraved or printed?” she then asks. “Can you tell the difference between engraved and printed by looking at what you have?”