The freezer door is open wide, the adjustable shelves inside empty because someone, presumably Fielding, removed all the specimens and smashed them to the stone floor, then turned on the space heater. I notice partial labels adhering to glass fragments on a floor that is otherwise clean, the cellar appearing whitewashed with something nonglossy, like primer, like a wine-maker’s cave that has been turned into a laboratory with a steel sink and steel countertop, and racks for test tubes, large steel tanks of liquid nitrogen, and central to the main room I’m in, a long metal table that Fielding probably was using for shipping, and several chairs, one of them pulled out a little, as if someone might have been sitting in it. I look at the chair first, and I look for blood, but I don’t see any.
The table is covered with white butcher paper, and arranged on it are pairs of elbow-length bright-blue cryogloves, ampoules, rollerbases, smudge-proof pens, and long corks and measuring sticks for storage canisters, and stacked underneath are white cardboard boxes called CryoCubes, which are inexpensive vapor shippers we typically use for sending biological materials that are placed inside an aluminum canister, where they can remain frozen at minus-one-hundred-and-fifty degrees centigrade for up to five days. These special packing containers can also be used to ship frozen semen, and in fact are often referred to as “semen tanks” and are favored by animal breeders.
I can only assume that Fielding’s equipment and materials for his illegal and outrageous cottage industry were purloined from the CFC, that in the dark of night or after hours, he somehow managed to sneak what he wanted out of the labs without security batting an eye. Or it is possible he simply ordered what he needed and charged it to us but had it shipped directly here, to the sea captain’s house. Even as I’m piecing together what he might have done, he is so close to me I could touch him, under a disposable blue sheet on his clean white primer–painted floor that is stained with blood at one edge of the plasticized paper, a spot of blood that is part of a large pool under his head, based on what I know. From where I’m standing, I can see the blood has begun to separate and coagulate, is in the early stages of decomposition, a process that would have been dramatically slowed because of the ambient temperature in the cellar. It is cold enough to see your breath, as cold as a morgue refrigerator.
The flashgun of a camera goes off, and then goes off again as a broad-shouldered figure in blaze yellow photographs the one area of whitewashed wall down here that is blackened and foul, where a total station on a bright yellow tripod has been set up, and I’m guessing the electro-optical distance-measuring system has already mapped the scene, recording the coordinate data of every feature, including what Colonel Pruitt is photographing. He catches me looking at him and lowers the camera to his side as I walk over to a wall where I smell death, the faintest musty pungent stench of blood that has broken down and dried over months in a sunless, cold environment. I smell mildew. I smell dust, and I notice piles of torn dirty carpet and plywood nearby against a different wall, and I can tell by dust and dirt on the white floor that the carpet and wood was recently dragged to where it is.
Bolted into stone at the height of my head are a series of steel screw pin anchor shackles that I associate with sling assemblies used in hoisting. Based on coils of rope, grease guns, clamps, a cargo trolley, and grab hooks and swivel rings in the ceiling, I surmise that Fielding devised a creative rig for changing out the heavy tanks of liquid nitrogen, and at some point the system was perverted into one I suspect he never intended when he began extracting semen and selling it.
“From what I’m able to figure out so far, the main thing used was the splitting maul, which would account for both the blunt-force and cutting injuries,” Pruitt begins without so much as hello, as if our meeting here is normal, nothing more than a continuum of our time together at Dover. “Basically, a long-handled sledgehammer on one side, the other side sharp like an ax. It was under carpet and wood, along with a Boston College letter jacket, a pair of sneakers, other items of clothing that we think were Wally Jamison’s. This entire area was under that stuff over there.” He indicates the carpet and wood that was moved, what I surmise was used to cover the crime scene. “All of it, including the splitting maul, of course, has been packaged and sent to your place already. Did you see the weapon yet?” Pruitt says, shaking his head.
“No.”
“Can’t imagine someone coming after me with something like that. Jesus. Shades of Lizzie Borden. And pieces of bloody rope from being strung up.” He points to the shackles and rings bolted into stone that is crusty and black with old blood, and I almost imagine I can smell fear down here, the unimaginable terror of the football player tortured and murdered on Halloween.
“Why didn’t he clean this up?” I ask the first question that comes to mind as I look at a scene that doesn’t appear to have been touched after Wally Jamison was brutally and sadistically murdered down here.
“I guess he took the path of least resistance and just covered everything up with plyboard and old carpet,” Pruitt replies. “That’s why there’s a lot of dirt and fibers everywhere. Appears after the homicide, he didn’t bother washing things down at all. Just heaped old carpet on top and leaned all these boards against the wall.” He points again to the pile of old torn carpet of different colors, and near it, the large sheets of plyboard stacked on the white floor near a closed access door that leads outside the cellar.
“I don’t know why he wouldn’t have washed it down,” I repeat. “That was three months ago. He just left a crime scene, practically left it like a time capsule? Just threw carpet and plyboard over it?”
“One theory is he got off on it. Like people who photograph or film what they do so they can continue getting off on it after the fact. Every time he came down here, he knew what was behind the boards and carpet, what was hidden under them, and got off on it.”
Or someone got off on it, I think. Jack Fielding has never gotten off on gore. For a forensic pathologist, he was actually rather squeamish. Benton will say it was the influence of drugs. Everyone is probably saying that, and maybe it’s true. Fielding was altered, that much I don’t doubt.
“Some of us can help you with this, you know,” Pruitt then says, looking at me through a plastic face shield that clouds up intermittently as he breathes the cold cellar air. His hazel eyes are alert and friendly as they look at me, but he is troubled. How could anybody not be, and I wonder if he senses what I do. I wonder if he has a feeling in his gut that something is wrong with all this. I wonder if he’s asking the question I am right now as I look at the blackened whitewashed wall with the rusting shackles bolted into the stone.
Why would Jack Fielding do something like this?
Extracting semen to sell to bereft families is almost understandable. One can easily blame greed or even a lust for the gratification, the power he must have felt when he was able to give back life where it had been taken. But as I envision the photographs, video recordings, and CT scans I’ve seen of Wally Jamison’s mutilated body, I’m reminded of what went through my thoughts at the time. His murder seemed sexually and emotionally driven, as if the person who swung the weapon at him had feelings for him, certainly had a rage that didn’t quit until Wally was lacerated, sliced, cut, and contused beyond recognition and bled to death. Afterward, his nude body was transported, probably by boat, probably by Fielding’s boat, and dumped in the harbor at the coast guard station, an act that Benton describes as brazen, as a taunt to law enforcement. And that doesn’t sound like Fielding, either. For such a fierce muscle-bound grandmaster, he was rather much a coward.
“Thank you. Let’s see what’s needed,” I say to Pruitt.
“Well, you know the DNA that’s needed. Hundreds of samples already, not just the semen that needs to be reconnected with its donor but everything else being swabbed.”
“I know. It’s a huge job and will go on for quite a while because we don’t know what’s happened in here. Just part of it. What was in the freezer and then w
hatever else was done in addition to what I’m supposing must have been the homicide of the BC student, Wally Jamison.” As I say his name I envision him, square-jawed with curly black hair and bright blue eyes, and powerfully built. Then what he looked like later. “What time did you get here?”
“John and I flew in early, got here about seven hours ago.”
I don’t ask him where Briggs is now.
“He did the external exam and will go over those details with you when you’re ready,” Pruitt adds.
“And nobody had touched him prior to that.” Fielding’s body was discovered shortly after three a.m. Or that’s what I’ve been told.
“When John and I got here, the body was covered just like he is now. The Glock isn’t here. After the FBI restored the eradicated serial number, the gun was bagged and is now at your labs,” Pruitt tells me what Benton did.
“I didn’t know about it until a little while ago. When I was being driven here.”
“Look. If I’d been here at three a.m. and it was up to me?” He starts to say he would have told me everything that was going on. “But the FBI wanted to keep things contained, since no one’s been sure if he was a lone wolf.” He means if Fielding was. “Because of all the other factors, like Dr. Saltz and the MP and so on. The fear of terrorism.”
“Yes. Only not the brand of terrorism the Bureau usually has to worry about. This is a different brand of terrorism,” I comment. “It feels personal. Doesn’t it feel personal? What are you thinking about all this?”
“Nobody had touched the body when the police, the FBI found it.” Pruitt doesn’t want to tell me what he thinks about it. “I do know he was the same temperature as the room by then, had been down here for a while, but you should talk to John about it.”
“You’re saying his body was the same temperature as the ambient air at five a.m.”
“It’s forty degrees, or around that. Maybe a few degrees warmer because of all the people down here. But you need to get the details from John.”
Pruitt stares off at the human-shaped mound draped with a blue sheet on the other side of the cellar, near the freezer, near thawing fluids on the stone floor, where investigators have knee pads on and are collecting one shard of glass at a time and swabbing, and packaging each item separately in paper envelopes that they label with permanent markers. I won’t do the calculations until I check the body, but already what I’m hearing adds to what I suspect. Something is wrong.
21
The stain on the whitewashed wall is an ugly darkness some six feet above the stone floor, probably where Wally Jamison’s head and neck were when he was shackled and beaten and cut to death.
Spraying out from the largest stain are a constellation of pinpoint spatters, tiny black marks that at close inspection are elongated, are angled, the cast-off blood from the weapon as it was repeatedly swung, as it was repeatedly bloodied from impacting with human flesh, and I envision the wood-splitting maul Pruitt mentioned, and I agree with him. What a terrible way to die. Then I think of the injection knife. Another horrendous way to die. Sadism.
“He should have had a system of keeping track of the samples,” I say to Pruitt as I watch the investigators in bright yellow, on their hands and knees, some of them people I don’t know. Maybe St. Hilaire from Salem. Maybe Lester “Lawless” Law from Cambridge. I’m not sure who is here, really, just that the FBI is working in conjunction with a special task force comprising investigators from various departments who are members of the North Eastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council, NEMLEC. “If he really was selling extracted semen,” I continue my train of thought, “I would assume he had a way of logging the specimens.” I direct his attention to bits of gummy labels still adhering to broken glass on the floor. “Finding information like that will help us with identification, maybe preliminarily supply it, and then we can verify through DNA. If all of the specimens came from CFC cases, we should have DNA on blood-spot cards in each case file.”
“I know Marino is looking into that, has somebody pulling every case of young males who would have been viable candidates. Especially if Fielding did the autopsies.”
“With all due respect, that was my direction, not Marino’s.” I hear the defensiveness I can’t keep out of my tone, but I’ve had enough of my new self-appointed acting chief Pete Marino. I’ve had enough references that imply he runs my office.
“We’ve not found a log yet,” Pruitt adds. “But Farinelli’s over there with his laptop, which was as dead as he was when we got here. Maybe the log will be on that.”
It always seems strange when investigators refer to my niece by her last name. Lucy must be next door in the house, where there are no lights or heat, unless the power has come back on. I realize that down here I might not know, since we are using auxiliary lights brought in and set up. I walk over to an open Pelican case near the bottom of the stairs and find a flashlight, then return to the wall to shine the light over bloodstains to see what else they have to tell me before I look at the person who supposedly caused them, my deputy chief, working alone in his Kill Cellar. My deputy chief, the lone wolf who had no help in all this, I think skeptically and with growing anger at the police, the FBI, at everyone who started working the scene without me.
Below the darkest area on the whitewashed wall is a corresponding dark area on the whitewashed floor, a myriad of drips that combine into a solid stain, what I can tell was a pool of blood that is almost black and flaking, much of it having soaked into the porous whitewashed stone. Some of the drops at the edge of the large stained area are perfectly round, with only a small amount of distortion or scalloping around the edges from the roughness of the stone, passive spatters from the victim bleeding. Other stains are smeared from someone, possibly the assailant, stepping on them or dragging something over them while they were still wet. Maybe dragging carpet and plyboards over them, I think. The only bloodstains that show a direction of travel are those on the wall and the ceiling, black and elongated or with a teardrop shape, and I believe most of these were projected by the repeated swings and impacts of the weapon.
The victim was upright when he bled, shackled to the wall, it would seem, and what I can’t tell is the timing of at least one blow that I know was fatal. Did it happen early on or later? The earlier, the better, I can’t help but think as I imagine what was done, as I reconstruct the pain and suffering and most of all his terror. I hope he hadn’t been subjected to the abuse for long when an artery was breached, most likely the carotid on the left side of his neck. The distinctive wave pattern on the wall is from arterial blood spurting out under high pressure in rhythm to the beats of his heart, and I remember photographs I saw, the deep gashes to his neck.
Wally Jamison would have lived only minutes after receiving such an injury, and I wonder how long the cutting and beating went on after it was too late to hurt him anymore. I wonder about the rage and what the connection might have been between Wally Jamison and Jack Fielding. It had to be more than that they simply went to the same gym. Wally wasn’t involved in martial arts, and as far as anyone knows, he wasn’t acquainted with Johnny Donahue or Eli Goldman or Mark Bishop. He didn’t work or intern at Otwahl, either, and apparently had nothing to do with robotics or other technologies. What I know about Wally Jamison is that he was from Florida, a senior at BC, where he was majoring in history and somewhat of a celebrity because of football, and a partier, a ladies’ man. I can’t come up with a single reason why Fielding might have known him, unless it was some chance encounter they had, perhaps because of the gym and then perhaps drugs, the hormonal cocktail Benton mentioned.
Wally Jamison’s toxicology was negative for illegal or therapeutic drugs or alcohol, but we don’t routinely test for steroids unless we have reason to suspect a death may be related to them. Wally’s cause of death wasn’t a question. There certainly was no reason to think steroids killed him, at least not directly, and now it may be too late to go back. We’re not going to get another sample of
his urine, although we can try testing his hair, where the molecules of drugs, including steroids, might have accumulated inside the hair shaft. A test like that would be a long shot for detecting steroids, and it isn’t going to tell us if Wally got them from Fielding or knew Fielding or was murdered by him. But I’m willing to try anything, because as I look around this cellar and see the shape of Fielding’s body under a sheet on the floor, I want to know why. I have to know and won’t accept that he was crazy, that he’d lost his mind. That’s just not good enough.
Returning to the Pelican case near the stairs, I find a pair of knee pads and put them on before kneeling by the rounded blue sheet, and when I pull it back from Jack Fielding’s face, I’m not prepared for how present he looks. That’s the word that comes to mind, present, as if he’s still here, as if he’s asleep but not well. There is nothing vital or vibrant about him, and my brain races through the details I’m seeing, the stiff strands of hair from the gel he used to hide his baldness, the red splotches on his face, which is puffy and pale, and I pull the sheet off, and it rustles as I move it out of my way. I sit back on the heels of my rubber boots and look him over, taking in his gelled sandy-brown hair that was thinning on top and gone in spots, and the dried blood around his ear and pooled under his head.
I imagine Fielding pointing the barrel of the Glock inside his left ear and pulling the trigger. I try to get into his mind, try to conjure up his last thoughts. Why would he do that? Why his ear? The side of the head is common in gunshot suicides, but not the ear, and why his left side and not his right? Fielding was right-handed. I used to tease him about having what I called “extreme handedness” because he couldn’t do anything useful with his left hand, nothing that required any degree of dexterity or skill. He certainly didn’t shoot himself in his left ear while holding the pistol in his right hand, not unless he’d become a contortionist in my absence, and maybe that will be one more speculation everyone will come up with. But I need to check the angle. I point my right finger into my left ear canal as best I can, pretending my index finger is the barrel of the Glock.