Chaos

  “You just let me know what you want me to do,” Georgia folds her thick arms across her formidable chest, and I don’t know how effective she’d be in a fight but I wouldn’t want to challenge her.

  “That will be largely decided by our guests,” as I turn back several pages in the log, wondering if there’s been a mistake.

  “Well I can already tell you what they’ll do,” Georgia is getting worked up by the thought of her turf being overrun. “They’re going to snoop into every damn thing they can while they have the chance.”

  “We won’t give it to them,” I reply as I continue to peruse the log, and I didn’t expect Molly Hinders’s body to still be here.

  But it must be. Had it been released there would be a handwritten record of it, and as I read the entry made Monday, September 5, I’m reminded of the address.

  Granite Street.

  Bryce and Ethan live on Granite Street here in Cambridge very close to Magazine Park on the river. They moved there last spring, and I’m startled and not quite sure why.

  “It appears Molly Hinders wasn’t released after I left yesterday.” I return the log to its spot on the ledge. “I thought she was being picked up by the funeral home. Did Doctor Wier run into some sort of problem?”

  Lee Wier is one of my forensic pathologists, and she knows what she’s doing because I trained her.

  “Well that’s turned into quite the cluster F.”

  I have a bad feeling Georgia’s right about that. Molly Hinders is Investigator Barclay’s case, and Marino needs to intervene.

  “That poor lady couldn’t have worse luck. Now everybody’s drunk and fighting while she’s all by her lonesome in a damn cooler,” Georgia is telling me as I keep thinking about what Dr. Wier said as she was going over the case during staff meeting several mornings ago.

  When Molly Hinders’s body was found it was near a plugged-in stereo speaker that had fallen from its mount and was on the wet grass. It was the only explanation for how she could have been electrocuted in her backyard as she watered her plants with a hose. But it’s really never made sense to me that a speaker circuit could kill anyone.

  HER SCALP AND HAIR were burned from coming into contact with the electrical source that killed her.

  This was the early evening of the Labor Day holiday, and she’d returned home from kayaking on the Charles River. She removed her kayak from her car’s rooftop rack, dragged it into the backyard, then entered the house and poured herself a glass of wine. Still in her bathing suit, she went out to water the backyard, where there’s a stereo system, a wrought-iron table and chairs, and a barbecue under a partially covered pergola overgrown with vines.

  When the police arrived the stereo system had no power because the ground-fault circuit interrupter—similar to a breaker—had been tripped. That alone should have prevented her from being shocked, much less killed. For some reason it didn’t, and I’ve found this puzzling from the start. But the case didn’t grab my attention then the way it does now. Molly Hinders is reminding me too much of Elisa Vandersteel and General Briggs.

  “Please explain why Molly Hinders is still here,” I ask again.

  “From what I gather,” Georgia says, “her family has money, and she and her estranged husband weren’t divorced yet. So he’s fighting over who’s claiming the body. They’re fighting over everything because she was real young and there’s no will, no nothing, and then the kicker? They fired the first funeral home they picked, so we can’t exactly be releasing her to anyone yet anyway.”

  “It’s just as well, fortuitous in fact, because there may be other problems,” I reply as I hear the sound of the elevator doors opening. “I don’t want her released until I say. I want to check on a few things,” I add as Bryce appears, and he’s changed his clothes since we talked by phone in the trailer what seems an eternity ago.

  “Who aren’t we releasing?” my chief of staff says, and his blue eyes look a little bleary, maybe from hard cider.

  He has on tight stovepipe jeans, a T-shirt and lots of Goth jewelry, spunking himself up for the Feds. Bryce loves to flirt, and the more it’s not appreciated the better.

  “Molly Hinders,” I inform him. “Her manner of death will be undetermined pending further investigation. I need you to let Doctor Wier know.” Then I ask Bryce if there’s anything new on his marijuana-tattoo mystery. “I don’t suppose we’ve figured out how that detail ended up in a nine-one-one call.” I put it to him bluntly.

  “Sure. Ethan and me got to the bottom of it,” he says too flippantly as his boyish face turns red. “The weirdo next door? You know our jerk-off neighbor? It had to be him paying me back.”

  “How’d he know what’s going on inside your own house?” Georgia pipes up, and obviously she’s familiar with the tattoo story.

  Bryce probably couldn’t wait to tell her.

  “Paying you back for what?” I ask him.

  “Well …”

  “Bryce? Your face is beet red. Obviously you know. Tell me how your neighbor found out about your fake tattoo.”

  “Well it seems I got a little drunker than I thought on margaritas made with that to-die-for tequila your sister gave us? And apparently after our friends left I went to take the trash out, and I heard this same really weird noise and saw a strange light again. So of course I tripped on something and fell down, and then there he was trying to help me up. Only in that crazy moment it wasn’t a he. It was this thing, and I really thought it had happened this time.”

  “What the hell?” Georgia has stopped typing, staring bug-eyed at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “I really thought I was being abducted by aliens for some research project they must be doing.”

  “Jeeees-us.” She starts shaking her head. “You sure do waste my time.”

  “I’m dead serious. I’ve been seeing weird lights in the sky at night.”

  “They’re called stars and airplanes.” Georgia just keeps shaking her head.

  “Am I to assume it was your neighbor who showed up while you were out with the trash?” I ask.

  “Donald the Nasty. I don’t remember what happened but Ethan does because I guess he came out to look for me and heard the ugly things I apparently said. Ethan was upset, telling me to thank Donald for coming to my aid, can you imagine? And of course in my confusion I yelled, How the frick do we know he’s not the one who pushed me down?”

  “And he knew about your tattoo how?” I again ask.

  “Because of his flashlight, and I had on shorts and was barefoot. So he saw it and made some crack about us being potheads, and that it figured. But I don’t remember any of it.”

  “Marino needs to know every word,” I reply. “Please call right away. Find him, and tell him we need to talk.”

  CHAPTER 40

  I REACH THROUGH GEORGIA’S WINDOW to remove the handheld RFID reader from its charging cradle. Walking over to Cooler number two, I lift the big steel handle, and the huge polished door opens with a quiet suck and a puff of condensation that looks like fog but smells like death.

  I move through the chilled foul air inside a huge frigid space filled with steel trays bearing body-shaped mounds, each pouch tagged with a chip embedded in a plastic sticker that should match the chip in the decedent’s yellow wristband. Redundancy. Because one of the worst things you can do is lose someone, and I scan with the reader, holding it like a gun until I locate Molly Hinders.

  My breath smokes out as I unzip her pouch, and the sound of blowing air is loud. I grab a pair of gloves from the box on a gurney, and momentarily I’m working my purple-sheathed fingers through her short curly black hair. Everywhere I touch is refrigerated cold as I feel around the sutured autopsy incision that follows her hairline, over her ears and around the back of her head, where I find the small gaping wound in her scalp.

  Dr. Lee Wier did exactly what she was trained to do and what I recommended to her when we discussed this case. She made sure to surgically remove the burned tissue
so we could have Ernie check it for microscopic particles of metals or other materials that might have been transferred to the wounds. She should have sent these samples to the histology lab days ago, and I walk back out of the cooler. Shutting the heavy door, I hope for a good signal on my phone as I try Paula in the histology lab.

  “I finished up everything on that yesterday afternoon,” she says in my earpiece after I ask how the case is coming. “Doctor Wier had asked me to get on it as soon as I could because of the prep time involved, so that’s what I did.”

  “She specifically asked you to prepare wet samples for Ernie.”

  “Absolutely. I prepped four separate specimens from the burn on the victim’s head.”

  “I’m very happy to hear it,” I reply because the burned tissue would have to be dehydrated with acetone before it could be placed inside the vacuum chamber of an electron microscope, and this can take days.

  Had Dr. Wier and Paula not been fast acting, there might not be anything to analyze until the weekend, and waiting couldn’t be a worse idea. Depending on what we’re dealing with, someone else might die, and up ahead I see the open door as I follow the empty corridor, passing labs and other work spaces that are dark at this early hour.

  Inside the large-scale X-ray control room Anne’s desk is empty, her pocketbook and keys on top of it. Through a leaded-glass window I can see her in the room on the other side, standing at the creamy-white large-bore CT scanner, a lab coat on over her jeans, talking to Luke Zenner, who’s changed into scrubs. On the table in front of them is Elisa Vandersteel’s pouched body, and I open the door connecting the control and scan rooms.

  “You’re just who I need to see,” I say to Luke as I walk in.

  I explain it’s possible that Molly Hinders and Elisa Vandersteel aren’t accidental deaths. They may be homicides that are connected, and I also let them know about Briggs. Luke and Anne begin asking questions I can’t answer. They get increasingly upset.

  “We can’t get into it now,” I finally tell them because we really can’t. “We need to save our feelings for later. We have to focus and find out what’s killing these people, and if it’s electrical malfunctions, flukes or deliberate, such as some weapon we’ve not seen before.”

  “It’s hard to imagine everything suddenly happening is coincidental,” Luke says, and his eyes are hard and he’s clenching his jaw.

  “When you’re done,” I continue, “photograph the burns before excising them, and the tissue goes straight to Paula. Of primary interest are the very fine linear whitish leathery burns on her upper back and lower posterior neck, and also the top of her right hand and wrist.”

  “I’ll need to take off the paper bags anyway,” Luke says. “So I’ll just do all of it in here, get everything ready for the labs. Then I’ll have her moved into the decomp room.”

  “I’m going upstairs to clean up,” I reply.

  “Now that’s an idea. Nothing like cleaning up before you do an autopsy in the decomp room,” Anne says drolly, and she gives me an idea.

  “I understand there have been some problems with the ventilation in there,” I point out, and Anne gets a blank look on her plain but pleasant face, then she frowns, and then she gets it.

  “Oh that,” she says as if she suddenly remembers. “You must be talking about the downdraft table in there,” she recalls, but she’s making it up. “The airflow wasn’t pulling odors down and venting them away from people working, I believe that was the problem the other day, and I heard the stench was so bad it had legs,” she improvs. “So I hope for the sake of our guests that we don’t have a problem this morning.”

  “That would be too bad,” I agree.

  THIRTY MINUTES LATER, UPSTAIRS inside my office suite, I emerge from the bathroom drying my hair with a towel.

  Dressed in clean blue scrubs and black rubber surgical clogs, I walk through my sitting area of leather furniture in soothing earth tones, a conference table, and my personal collection of anatomical drawings by Max Brödel, Edwin Landseer, Frank Netter, in addition to eighteenth-century prints of William Hogarth’s Four Stages of Cruelty.

  Near my desk the data wall displays the time and other information in bright digits against glassy blackness. 3:08.45 AM EST … 3:09.50 … 3:10.00 … I watch the seconds silently advance as I select an app on my phone that offers a menu of CFC zones inside and out that are constantly monitored by security cameras. The data wall splits into screens that display live feeds, and my back parking lot has filled up considerably since I last checked.

  There are several dark blue and black sedans and SUVs, and I pan and tilt, checking other zones and discovering the black Tahoe inside the bay where only Lucy is cheeky enough to leave her cars. Roger Mahant is already back, and he’s come with quite a posse, it seems. I wonder why Georgia didn’t let me know. Maybe she tried and I was in the shower.

  I call her desk extension and it begins to ring as I watch digital seconds tick past. Ringing and ringing. 3:12.11 … 3:13.10 … 3:14.00 … Oddly there’s no answer downstairs at her desk, and then my phone rings.

  “What’s going on?” I assume it’s Georgia.

  “Hello?” Ernie Koppel says. “Kay?”

  “I’m sorry. I was trying to call downstairs …”

  “Can you drop by?” he asks. “I don’t usually say something’s urgent but you need to see this before anybody else does. I’m waiting for a confirmation but if you’ve got a minute I think I’ve found something that’s a first. At least for a crime lab.”

  He tells me where he is, which electron microscope, and I grab my lab coat off the back of my desk chair, hurrying out the door. I decide to avoid the elevator. Not only is it notoriously slow in my state-of-the-art biotech headquarters but I intend to duck and dodge the FBI every chance I get. A good way to start is by using the emergency stairs. While anyone can take them to exit the building, you can’t access our floors without an ID badge or a code.

  So I’m not likely to run into anyone, and my clogs echo on the metal-edged concrete steps as I descend to the lower level. It’s as quiet as a bomb shelter in the stairwell as I go down and down, unlocking the door at the bottom. It opens into our evidence bay, where we process large items, typically cars and trucks, but we’ve also recovered evidence from supercars, motorcycles, Jet Skis, and even a homebuilt hang glider that obviously didn’t work very well or it and its owner wouldn’t have ended up here.

  The lights are on a low, energy-saving setting, and I briskly walk through the gloom, passing exam spaces occupied by current cases. A boat under a tent will be fumed with superglue to develop possible latent prints, and two spaces down from that is the camper where a suspected murder-suicide occurred. Next to that, a stand-alone bay is covered in blood-spattered-and-streaked white paper from ceiling to floor to reconstruct a stabbing.

  I head toward an illuminated red IN USE sign above the concrete bunker housing the transmission electron microscope, the TEM. Scanning my thumbprint on the biometric reader, I pass through the stainless-steel door as it slides open with a swoosh that always reminds me of Star Trek. I’m greeted by the familiar rush of positive-pressure air blowing my hair as I step inside, and the door whispers shut behind me.

  “Howdy. Come on in and take a load off,” Ernie says in the near dark from the console of the half-ton microscope. “Because you’re going to want to sit down for this.”

  My top trace-evidence examiner always reminds me of a submarine pilot as he sits in front of a periscope-like thick metal tube that rises nearly to the ceiling and is topped by the assembly of the cathode, what most people call an electron gun but I tend to think of as more like a lightbulb. Its simple hairpin-shaped tungsten wire fires thermo-ionic emissions at whatever we decide to analyze, and I always find it cavelike in here, stuffy and claustrophobic.

  The thick concrete walls are acoustically dead, and the dark fabric-covered fiberglass insulation seems to suck in all light. I have the sensation of being at the bottom of the sea
, underground or lost in the cosmos. I always feel as if I’m passing into the unknown like Alice through the looking glass. And in a way I am because the world Ernie navigates can’t be managed without instruments capable of detecting particles as small as one-billionth of a meter or seventy-five-thousandth the diameter of a human hair.

  I could fit thousands of skin cells and specks of dust on such minuscule and ubiquitous evidence, what I think of as the universal detritus shed by negativity and bad karma. People leave all sorts of seemingly undetectable trash in their wake, and it’s constantly recycled. It can end up in the damnedest places as we track the tiniest tattletales in and out, passing them from one person or object to another, from one continent to the next.

  I think back to when I saw Ernie last, maybe a month ago, and since then his blond-streaked graying hair has gotten longer. I notice that peeking out under his lab coat are a black suit and a bolo tie with a silver-and-turquoise arrowhead slide. He has on a black lizard belt, matching black cowboy boots, and I’m betting his black Stetson with its gambler crease is in his office. He must have court later today, a deposition or some other reason to dress up, and I ask him that.

  “Nope.” His blue eyes sparkle in his weathered face. “Something much more important. I was planning on heading over to the Kennedy School after work to hear your talk. I doubt I’ll have time to go home first. A bunch of us are going from here.”

  I’m touched and overwhelmed by sadness as I sit down. I tell him about Briggs.

  “Goddamn,” Ernie swears under his breath as I brief him on what I fear we might be dealing with.

  “Energy or electricity that’s been weaponized somehow,” I tell him what Benton suggested.

  “Well in a bizarre way that would make sense,” Ernie says.

  “You’ve found something that might hint at such a thing?”

  “Not exactly and maybe. I actually got onto this yesterday before I left,” he refers to the Molly Hinders case as I continue scanning the bank of monitors overhead, not making much sense of what I’m seeing.