I would never return so much as a teasing needle to a surgical cart without first washing it with hot, soapy water, and the drumming of hot water into deep metal sinks was a pervasive sound in the morgues of my past. As far back as my Richmond days—even earlier, when I was just starting at Walter Reed—I knew about DNA and that it was about to be admissible in court and become the forensic gold standard, and from that point forward, everything we did at crime scenes and in the autopsy suite and in the labs would be questioned on the witness stand. Contamination was about to become the ultimate nemesis, and although we don’t make a routine of autoclaving our surgical instruments at the CFC, we certainly don’t give them a cursory splash under the faucet and then toss them onto a cutting board that isn’t clean, either.
I pick up an eighteen-inch dissecting knife and notice a trace of dried blood in the scored stainless-steel handle and that the steel blade is scratched and pitted along the edge and spotted instead of razor-sharp and as bright as polished silver. I notice blood in the serrated blade of a bone saw and dried bloodstains on a spool of waxed five-cord thread and on a double-curved needle. I pick up forceps, scissors, rib shears, a chisel, a flexible probe, and am dismayed by the poor condition everything is in.
I will send Anne a message to hose down my station and wash all of its instruments before we autopsy the man from Norton’s Woods. I will have this entire goddamn autopsy room cleaned from the ceiling to the floor. I will have all of its systems inspected before my first week home has passed, I decide, as I pull on a fresh pair of gloves and walk to a countertop where a large roll of white paper—what we call butcher paper—is attached to a wall-mounted dispenser. Paper makes a loud ripping sound as I tear off a section and cover an autopsy table midway down the room, a table that looks cleaner than mine.
I cover my AFME field clothes with a disposable gown, not bothering with the long ties in back, then return to my messy station. Against the wall is a large white polypropylene drying cabinet on hard rubber casters with a double clear acrylic door, which I unlock by entering a code in a digital keypad. Hanging inside are a sage-green nylon jacket with a black fleece collar, a blue denim shirt, black cargo pants, and a pair of boxer briefs, each on its own stainless-steel hanger, and on the tray at the bottom are a pair of scuffed brown leather boots, and next to them, a pair of gray wool socks. I recognize some of the clothing from the video clips I saw, and it gives me an unsettled feeling to look at it now. The cabinet’s centrifugal fan and HEPA exhaust filters make their low whirring sound as I look at the boots and the socks by picking them up one by one, finding nothing remarkable. The boxer briefs are white cotton with a crossover fly and elastic waistband, and I note nothing unusual, no stains or defects.
Spreading the coat open on the butcher paper–covered table, I slip my hands into the pockets, making sure nothing has been left in them, and I collect a clothing diagram and a clipboard and begin to make notes. The collar is a deep-pile synthetic fur and covered with dirt and sand and pieces of dry brown leaves that adhered to it when the man collapsed to the ground, and the heavy knit cuffs are dirty, too. The sage nylon shell is a very tough material, which appears to be tear-resistant and waterproof with a black fiberfill insulation, none of it easily penetrable unless the blade was strong and very sharp. I find no evidence of blood inside the liner of the coat, not even around the small slit in the back of it, but the areas of the outer shell, the shoulders, the sleeves, the back, are blackened and stiff with blood that collected in the bottom of the body pouch after the man was zipped inside it and then was transported to the CFC.
I don’t know how long he might have bled out while he was inside the bag and then the cooler, but he didn’t bleed from his wound. When I spread open the denim shirt, long-sleeved, a men’s size small, that still smells faintly of a cologne or an after-shave, I find only a spot of dark blood that has dried stiffly around the slit made by the blade. What Marino and Anne have reported seems to be accurate, that the man began bleeding from his nose and mouth while he was fully clothed inside the body bag, his head turned to the side, probably the same side it was turned to when I examined him in the x-ray room a little while ago. Blood must have dripped steadily from his face and into the bag, pooling in it and leaking from it, and I can see that easily when I look at it next, an adult-size cadaver pouch, typical of ones used by removal services, black with a nylon zipper. On the sides are webbing handles attached with rivets, and that’s often where the problem with leakage occurs, assuming the bag is intact with no tears or flaws in the heat-sealed seams. Blood seeps through rivets, especially if the pouch is really cheap, and this one is about twenty-five dollars’ worth of heavy-duty PVC, likely purchased by the case.
As I imagine what I just saw on the CT scan and realize how quickly the damage occurred in what clearly was a blitz attack, the bleeding makes no sense at all. It makes even less sense than it did when Marino first told me about it in Dover. The massive destruction to the man’s internal organs would have resulted in pulmonary hemorrhage that would have caused blood to drain out of the nose and mouth. But it should have happened almost instantly. I don’t understand why he didn’t bleed at the scene. When the paramedics were working to resuscitate him, he should have been bleeding from his face, and this would have been a clear indication that he hadn’t dropped dead from an arrhythmia.
As I leave the autopsy room to go upstairs, I envision the video clips again and remember my wondering about his black gloves and why he put them on when he entered the park. Where are they? I haven’t seen a pair of gloves. They weren’t in the evidence locker or in the drying cabinet, and I checked the pockets of the coat and didn’t find them. Based on what I saw in the recordings covertly made by the man’s headphones, he had the gloves on when he died, and I envision what I saw on Lucy’s iPad when I was riding in the van to the Civil Air Terminal. A black-gloved hand entered the frame as if the man was swatting at something and there was a jostling sound as his hand hit the headphones while his voice blurted out, “What the…? Hey… !” Then bare trees rushing up and around, then chipped bits of slate looming large on the ground and the thud of him hitting, and then the hem of a long, black coat flapping past. Then silence, then the voices of people surrounding him and exclaiming that he wasn’t breathing.
The x-ray room door is closed when I get to it, and I check inside, but everyone is gone, the control room empty and quiet, the CT scanner glowing white in the low lights on the other side of the lead-lined glass. I pause to try the phone in there, hoping Anne might answer her cell, but if she’s already at McLean and in the neuroimaging lab, it will be impossible to reach her through the thick concrete walls of that place. I am surprised when she answers.
“Where are you?” I ask, and I can hear music in the background.
“Pulling up now,” she says, and she must be inside the van with Marino driving and the radio on.
“When you removed his clothing,” I say, “did you see a pair of black gloves? He may have been wearing a pair of thick black gloves.”
A pause, and I hear her say something to Marino and then I hear his voice, but I can’t make out what they’re saying to each other. Then she tells me, “No. And Marino says when he had the body in ID first thing, there were no gloves. He doesn’t remember gloves.”
“Tell me exactly what happened yesterday morning.”
“Just sit right here for a minute,” I hear her say to Marino. “No, not there yet or they’ll come out. The security guys will. Just wait here,” she says to him. “Okay,” she says to me. “A little bit after seven yesterday morning, Dr. Fielding came to x-ray. As you know, Ollie and I are always in early, by seven, and anyway, he was concerned because of the blood. He’d noticed blood drips on the floor outside the cooler and also inside it, and that the body was bleeding or had bled. A lot of blood in the pouch.”
“The body was still fully clothed.”
“Yes. The coat was unzipped and the shirt was cut open, the EMTs did
that, but he was clothed when he came in and nothing was done until Dr. Fielding went in there to get him ready for us.”
“What do you mean, ‘to get him ready’?”
I’ve never known Fielding to get a body ready for autopsy, to actually go to the trouble to move it out of the refrigerator and into x-ray or the autopsy room, at least not since the old days when he was in training. He leaves what he considers mundane tasks to those whom he still calls dieners and whom I call autopsy technicians.
“I only know he found the blood and then hurried to get us because he took the call from Cambridge PD, and as you know, it was assumed the guy was a sudden death that was natural, like an arrhythmia or a berry aneurysm or something.”
“Then what?”
“Then Ollie and I looked at the body, and we called Marino and he came and looked, and it was decided not to scan him or do the post yet.”
“He was left in the cooler?”
“No. Marino wanted to process him in ID first, to get his prints, swabs, so we could get started with IAFIS and DNA, with anything that might help us figure out who he is. The important point is there were no gloves at that time, because Marino would have had to take them off the body so he could print him.”
“Then where are they?”
“He doesn’t know, and I don’t, either.”
“Can you put him on, please?”
I hear her hand him the phone, and he says, “Yeah. I unzipped the pouch but didn’t take him out of it, and there was a lot of blood in it, like you know.”
“And you did what, exactly?”
“I printed him while he was in the pouch, and if there had been gloves, I sure as hell would have seen them.”
“Possible the squad removed the gloves at the scene and put them inside the pouch and you didn’t notice? And then they got misplaced somehow?”
“Nope. I looked for any personal effects, like I told you. The watch, ring, keychain, the stash box, the twenty-dollar bill. Took everything out of his pockets, and I always look inside the pouch for the very reason you just said. In case the squad or the removal service tucks something in there, like a hat or sunglasses or whatever. The headphones, too. And the satellite radio. They were in a paper bag and came in with the body.”
“What about Cambridge PD? I know Investigator Lawless brought in the Glock.”
“He receipted it to the firearms lab around ten a.m. That was all he brought in.”
“And when Anne put his clothing inside the drying cabinet, well, obviously she didn’t have the gloves if you say they weren’t there in the first place.”
I hear him say something, and then Anne is back on the phone, saying, “No. I didn’t see gloves when I put everything else in the cabinet. That was around nine p.m., almost four hours ago, when I undressed the body to get it ready for the scan, not long before you got to the CFC. I cleaned the cabinet to make sure it was sterile before I put his other clothing in there.”
“I’m glad something’s sterile. We need to clean my station.”
“Okay, okay,” she says, but not to me. “Wait. Jesus, Pete. Hold on.”
And then Marino’s voice in my ear: “There were other cases.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“We had other cases yesterday morning. So maybe someone removed the gloves, but I got no friggin’ idea why. Unless they maybe got picked up by mistake.”
“Who did the cases?”
“Dr. Lambotte, Dr. Booker.”
“What about Jack?”
“Two cases in addition to the guy from Norton’s Woods,” Marino says. “A woman who got hit by a train and an old guy who wasn’t under the care of a physician. Jack didn’t do shit, was gone with the wind,” Marino says. “He doesn’t bother with the scene, and so we get a body that starts bleeding in the fridge and now we got to prove the guy was dead.”
9
The directorate of what officially is called the Cambridge Forensic Center and Port Mortuary is on the top floor, and I have discovered that it is difficult to tell people how to find me when a building is round.
The best I’ve been able to do on the infrequent occasions I’ve been here is to instruct visitors to get off the elevator on the seventh floor, take a left, and look for number 111. It’s only one door down from 101, and to comprehend that 101 is the lowest room number on this floor and 111 is the highest requires some imagination. My office suite, therefore, would occupy a corner at the end of a long hallway if there were corners and long hallways, but there aren’t. Up here there is just one big circle with six offices, a large conference room, the reading room for voice-recognition dictation, the library, the break room, and in the center a windowless bunker where Lucy chose to put the computer and questioned documents lab.
Walking past Marino’s office, I stop outside 111, what he calls CENTCOM for Central Command. I’m sure Marino came up with the pretentious appellation all on his own, not because he thinks of me as his commander but rather he’s come to think of himself as answering to a higher patriotic order that is close to a religious calling. His worship of all things military is new. It’s just one more thing that is paradoxical about him, as if Peter Rocco Marino needs yet another paradox to define his inconsistent and conflicted self.
I need to calm down about him, I say to myself as I unlock my heavy door with its titanium veneer. He isn’t so bad and didn’t do anything so terrible. He’s predictable, and I shouldn’t be surprised in the least. After all, who understands him better than I do? The Rosetta stone to Marino isn’t Bayonne, New Jersey, where he grew up a street fighter who became a boxer and then a cop. The key to him isn’t even his worthless alcoholic father. Marino can be explained by his mother first and foremost, and then his childhood sweetheart Doris, now his ex-wife, both women seemingly docile and subservient and sweet but not harmless. Not hardly.
I push buttons to turn on the flush-mount lighting built into the struts of the geodesic glass dome that is energy-efficient and reminds me of Buckminster Fuller every time I look up. Were the famed architect-inventor still among the living, he would approve of my building and possibly of me but not of our morbid raison d’être, I suspect, although at this stage of things I would have a few quibbles with him, too. For example, I don’t agree with his belief that technology can save us. Certainly, it isn’t making us more civilized, and I actually think the opposite is true.
I pause on gunmetal-gray carpet just inside my doorway as if waiting for permission to enter, or maybe I’m hesitant because to appropriate this space is to embrace a life I’ve rather much put off for the better part of two years. If I’m honest about it I should say I’ve put it off for decades, since my earliest days at Walter Reed, where I was minding my own business in a cramped, windowless room of AFIP headquarters when Briggs walked in without knocking and dropped an eight-by-eleven gray envelope on my desk with CLASSIFIED stamped on it.
December 4, 1987. I remember it so vividly I can describe what I was wearing and the weather and what I ate. I know I smoked a lot that day and had several straight Scotches at the end of it because I was excited and horrified. The case of all cases, and the DoD wanted me, picked me over all others. Or more accurately, Briggs did. By spring of the following year, I was discharged from the air force early, not on good behavior but because the Reagan administration wanted me gone, and I left under certain conditions that are shameful and cause pain even now. It is karmic that I find myself in a building of circles. Nothing has ended or begun in my life. What was far away is right next to me. Somehow it’s all the same.
The most blatant sign of my six-month absence from a position I’ve yet to really fill is that Bryce’s adjoining administrative office is comfortably cluttered while mine is empty and stark. It feels forlorn and lonely in here, my small conference table of brushed steel bare, not even a potted plant on it, and when I inhabit a space there are always plants. Orchids, gardenias, succulents, and indoor trees, such as areca and sago palms, because I want life and f
ragrances. But what I had in here when I moved in is gone and has been gone, overwatered and too much fertilizer. I gave Bryce detailed instructions and three months to kill everything. It took him less than two.
There is virtually nothing on my desk, a bow-shaped modular work station constructed of twenty-two-gauge steel with a black laminate surface and a matching hutch of file drawers and open shelves between expansive windows overlooking the Charles and the Boston skyline. A black granite countertop behind my Aeron chair runs the length of the wall and is home to my Leica Laser Microdissection System and its video displays and accoutrements, and nearby is my faithful back-up Leica for daily use, a more basic laboratory research microscope that I can operate with one hand and without software or a training seminar. There isn’t much else, no case files in sight, no death certificates or other paperwork for me to review and initial, no mail, and very few personal effects. I decide it’s not a good thing to have such a perfectly arranged, immaculate office. I’d rather have a landfill. It’s peculiar that being faced with an empty work space should make me feel so overwhelmed, and as I seal Erica Donahue’s letter in a plastic bag I finally realize why I’m not a fan of a world that is fast becoming paperless. I like to see the enemy, stacks of what I must conquer, and I take comfort in reams of friends.
I’m locking the letter in a cabinet when Lucy silently appears like an apparition in a voluminous white lab coat she wears for its warmth and what she can conceal beneath it, and she’s also fond of big pockets. The oversized coat makes her seem deceptively nonthreatening and much younger than her years, in her low thirties is the way she puts it, but she’ll forever be a little girl to me. I wonder if mothers always feel that way about their daughters, even when the daughters are mothers themselves, or in Lucy’s case, armed and dangerous.