Port Mortuary (42 page)

I can say and have said that Eli Goldman was an obstruction to the mercenary progress of a company like Otwahl, and Otwahl is the common denominator in everything, more so than tae kwon do or Fielding. As far as I’m concerned, if Fielding is as directly and solely responsible as everyone is claiming, then we should be taking a very hard and different look at Otwahl and wonder what he had to do with the place beyond being a user or a research subject or even someone who helped distribute experimental drugs until they brought about his complete annihilation.

“Otwahl and Jack Fielding,” I said to Benton a little while ago. If Fielding is guilty of murder and case-tampering and obstruction of justice and all sorts of lies and conspiracies, then he’s intimately connected with Otwahl, right down to its parking lot, where his Navigator likely got tucked out of sight last night during a blizzard. “You have to make that connection in a meaningful way,” I repeatedly told Benton on our drive to this desolate spot that is achingly beautiful and yet ruined, as if Fielding’s property is an ugly stain on the canvas of an exquisite seascape.

“Otwahl Technologies and an eighteenth-century sea captain’s house on Salem Neck,” I said to my husband, and I asked his opinion, his honest and objective opinion. After all, he should have a very well-informed and completely objective opinion because of his alliance with the well-informed and completely objective
we
‘s, as I stated it, these anonymous comrades of his, the shadowy rank and file of an FBI he doesn’t belong to anymore, he claims, and of course I don’t believe him. He is FBI, all right, as secretive and driven as I remember him from times long past, and maybe I could put up with that if I didn’t feel so utterly alone.

He’s not even listening to me anymore, pretty much checked out when I made the comment a few minutes ago that Fielding must have some link to Otwahl beyond his teaching martial arts to a few brainy students who had internships with the technology behemoth. The connection must be more than just drugs, I said. Drug-impregnated pain-relieving patches can’t be the entire explanation for what I’m about to find inside a tiny stone outbuilding that Fielding was turning into a guest quarters before he supposedly found another use for it that has earned it several new names.

The Kill Cottage,
I think darkly, bitterly.
The Semen’s House,
I think cynically.

Destined to be Salem’s latest attraction during Halloween, which lasts all of October, with a million people making a pilgrimage here from all over the land. Another example of a place made famous by atrocities that don’t seem real anymore, tall tales, almost cartoonish, like the witch on her broom depicted on the Salem logo that is on police patches and even painted on the police cruiser doors. Be careful what you hate and murder, because one day it will own you. The Witch City, as people have dubbed the place where those men and women were herded up to what is now called Gallows Hill Park, a spot similar to where Fielding bought a sea captain’s house. Places that don’t change much. Places that are now parks. Only Gallows Hill is ugly, and it should be. An open field ravaged by the wind, and barren. Mostly rocks, weeds, and patchy, coarse grass. Nothing grows there.

Thoughts like these are solar flares, and peak and spike with a timing I can’t seem to control, as Benton touches my elbow, then grips it firmly, while we cross the sandy dead-end street that has turned into a parking lot of law-enforcement vehicles, marked and unmarked, some with the Salem logo, silhouettes of witches straddling their brooms. Pulled up close to the sea captain’s house, almost right up against the back of it, is the CFC’s white van-body truck that Marino drove here hours earlier while I was in the autopsy room and then upstairs, having no idea what was happening some thirty miles northeast. The back of the truck is open, and Marino is inside, wearing green rubber boots and a bright-yellow hard hat and a bright-yellow level-A suit, what we use for demanding jobs that require protection from biological and chemical hazards.

Cables snake over the diamond-steel floor and out the open metal doors, over the unpaved icy drive, and disappear through the front of the stone cottage, what must have been a charming, cozy outbuilding before Fielding turned it into a construction site of exposed foundation blocks, the ground frozen with ice that is gray. The area behind the sea captain’s house is an eyesore of spilled cement and toppled piles of lumber and bricks, and rusting tools, shingles, weather stripping, and nails everywhere. A wheelbarrow is covered loosely with a black tarp that flaps, the entire perimeter strung with yellow crime scene tape that shakes and jumps in the wind.

“We got enough juice in this thing for lights and that’s it, got about a hundred and twenty minutes of run time left,” Marino says to me as he digs inside a built-in storage bin.

What he’s referring to is the auxiliary power unit, the APU, which can keep the truck’s electrical system running while the engine is off and supplies a limited amount of emergency power externally.

“Assuming the power doesn’t come back on, and maybe we’ll get lucky. I’ve heard it could anytime, the main problem being those poles knocked over by snapped-off trees you probably drove past on Derby Street on your way here. But even if we get the electricity back, it won’t help much in there.” He means in the stone outbuilding. “No heat in there. It’s cold as shit, and after a while it gets to you, I’m just telling you,” he says from inside the truck while Benton and I stand outside in the wind and I flip up the collar of my jacket. “Cold as our damn fridge at the morgue, if you can imagine working in there for hours.”

As if I’ve never worked a scene in frigid weather and am unfamiliar with a morgue cooler.

“Course, there are some advantages to that if the power goes out, which it’s going to do in these parts when you get storms, and he didn’t have a backup generator,” Marino continues.

He means that Fielding didn’t.

“And that’s a lot of money to lose if the freezer quits. Which is why plugging in a space heater and turning it on high was for the obvious reason of ruining the DNA so we’d never know who he’d taken the shit from. Do you think that’s possible?” he asks me.

“I’m not sure which part of it—” I start to say.

“That we won’t ID them. Possible we won’t?” Marino continues talking nonstop, as if he’s been drinking coffee since I saw him last. His eyes are bloodshot and glassy.

“No,” I reply. “I don’t think it’s possible. I think we’ll find out.”

“So you don’t think it’s as worthless as tapioca.”

“Christ,” Benton says. “I could have done without that. Christ, I wish you’d stop with the fucking food analogies.”

“Low copy number.” I remind Mario we can get a DNA profile from as little as three human cells. Unless virtually every cell is degraded, we’ll be okay, I assure him.

“Well, it’s only fair we really try.” Marino talks to me as if Benton’s not here, directing his every comment to me as if he’s in charge and doesn’t want to be reminded of my FBI or former FBI husband. “I mean, what if it was your son?”

“I agree we have to ID them and let their next of kin know,” I reply.

“And get sued, now that I think of it,” Marino reconsiders. “Well, maybe we shouldn’t tell anyone. Seems to me we just need to know who it came from. Why tell the families and open a can of worms?”

“Full disclosure,” Benton says ironically, as if he really knows what that is. He is looking at his iPhone, reading something on it, and he adds, “Because a lot of them probably already know. We’re assuming Fielding arranged with them up front to pay for the service he was offering. It’s not possible to hide anything.”

“We’re not going to,” I answer. “We don’t hide things, period.”

“Well, I’ll tell you. I’m thinking we really should install cameras inside our cooler, not just outside in the hall and the bay and certain rooms but actually in there,” Marino says to me, as if it has always been his belief that we should have cameras inside the coolers, probably inside the freezer, too. In fact, he’s never mentioned the idea before now. “I wonder if cameras would work in a cooler….” he is saying.

“They work outdoors. It gets colder in the winter around here than it is in the cooler,” Benton comments dully, barely listening to Marino, who is full of himself, enjoying his role in the drama that has unfolded, and he’s never liked Fielding. I can’t think of a bigger
I told you so.

“Well, we got to do it,” Marino says to me. “Cameras and no more of this shit, of people doing shit they think they can get away with.”

I look behind us at boots and shoes lined up outside the opening that leads into the cottage. The Kill Cottage, the Semen’s Cottage. Some cops are calling it the Little Shop of Horrors.

“Cameras,” I hear Marino as I stare at the stone cottage. “If we had them in the cooler, we’d have it all on tape. Well, hell, maybe it’s a good thing. Shit, imagine if something like that got leaked and ended up on YouTube. Fielding doing that to all these dead bodies. Jesus. I bet you have cameras like that at Dover, though.”

He hands us folded bright-yellow suits like his.

“Dover must have cameras in the coolers, right?” he goes on. “I’m sure DoD would spring for it, and nothing like the present to ask, right? In light of the circumstances, I don’t think anything’s off the table when it comes to beefing up security at our place….”

I realize Marino is still talking to me, but I don’t answer because I’m worrying about what’s in the cab of the truck. I’m suddenly overwhelmed by pity as I stand outside in the cold and wind and glare, my level-A suit folded up and tucked under my arm while Benton is putting his on.

And Marino goes on quite cheerfully, as if this is quite the carnival, “… Like I said, a good thing it’s cold. I can’t imagine working this on one of those ninety-degree days like we used to get in Richmond, where you can wring water out of the air and nothing’s stirring. I mean, what a fucking pig. Don’t even look at the toilet in there; probably the last time it was flushed was when they were still burning witches around here….”

“They were hanged,” I hear myself say.

Marino looks at me with a blank expression on his big face, and his nose and ears are red, the hard hat perched on top of his bald head like the bonnet of a yellow fireplug.

“How’s he doing?” I indicate the cab of the truck and what’s inside it.

“Anne’s a regular Dr. Dolittle. Did you know she wanted to be a vet before she decided to be Madam Curie?” He still says
curry,
like curry powder, no matter how many times I’ve told him it’s
Cure-ee,
like the element curium that’s named after Madame
Cure-ee.

“I tell you what, though,” he then says to me. “It’s a good thing the heat hadn’t been off in the house more than five, six hours before anybody got here. Dogs like that don’t have much more hair than I do. He’d dug himself under the covers in Fielding’s rat’s nest of a bed and was still shivering like he was having a seizure. Of course, he was scared shitless. All these cops, the FBI storming in with all their tactical gear, the whole nine yards. Not to mention I’ve heard that greyhounds don’t like to be left alone, have what do you call it, separation anxiety.”

He opens another storage bin and hands me a pair of boots, knowing my size without asking.

“How do you know it’s Jack’s bed?” I ask.

“It’s his shit everywhere. Who else’s would it be?”

“We need to be sure of everything.” I’m going to keep saying it. “He was out here in the middle of nowhere. No neighbors, no eyes or ears, the park deserted this time of year. How do you know for a fact he was alone out here? How can you be absolutely certain he didn’t have help?”

“Who? Who the hell would help him do something like this?” Marino looks at me, and I can see it on his big face, what he thinks. I can’t be rational about Fielding. That’s exactly what Marino thinks, probably what everybody thinks.

“We need to keep an open mind,” I reply, then I indicate the cab of the truck again and ask again about the dog.

“He’s fine,” Marino says. “Anne got him something to eat, chicken and rice from that Greek diner in Belmont, made him a nice comfy bed, and the heat’s blasting, feels like an oven, probably sucking up more to keep his skinny ass warm than we’re using in the cellar. You want to meet him?”

He hands us heavy black rubber gloves and disposable nitrile ones, and Benton blows on his hands to warm them as he continues text-messaging and reading whatever is landing on his phone. He doesn’t seem interested in anything Marino and I are saying.

“Let me take care of things first,” I tell Marino, because I don’t have it in me at the moment to see an abandoned dog that was left alone in a pitch-dark house with no heat after his master was murdered by the person who stole him. Or so the theory goes.

“Here’s the routine,” Marino then says, grabbing two bright-yellow hard hats and handing them to us. “Over there, where you’ll see plastic tubs for decon.” He points at an area of dirt near a sheet of plywood that serves as the cottage’s front door. “You don’t want to track anything beyond the perimeter. Suits and boots go on and off right over there.”

Lined up next to three plastic tubs filled with water is a bottle of Dawn dish-washing detergent and rows of footwear, the boots and shoes of the people inside, including what I recognize as a pair of tan combat boots, men’s size. Based on what I’m seeing, there are at least eight investigators working the scene, including someone who might be army, someone who might be Briggs. Marino bends over to check the status display on the diamond steel-encased APU in the back of the truck, then thuds down the diamond-steel steps out into the glare and sparkle of ice that coats bare trees as if they have been dipped in glass. Hanging everywhere are long, sharp icicles that remind me of nails and spears.