You don’t get over it, I think. Some things you won’t get over, not ever, you can’t…
Bad drugs, I recall what Marino just suggested to me. Designer ones, bath salts that have hit Massachusetts hard this past year, and we’ve had a number of bizarre suicides and accidents relating to them. There have been homicides and property crimes, an alarming increase in general, especially in the Boston area where there are Section 8 housing developments or what the police call the projects. People dealing drugs, gang members get a nice roof over their heads for a bargain, and they bring down the neighborhood and cause damage all around them. I go through my mental list of what needs to be done as I log on to my office e-mail. I notify toxicology to put a rush on the analysis in the Sakura Yamagata case and screen for designer stimulants.
Mephedrone, methylenedioxypyrovalerone or MDPV, and methylone. Luke didn’t think to include hallucinogens and we should test for those, too. LSD, methylergometrine, ergotamine…
My thoughts drift and focus.
Ergot alkaloids can cause ergotism also known as ergotoxicosis or Saint Anthony’s Fire, with symptoms resembling bewitchment that some believe may have led to the Salem witchcraft trials. Convulsions, spasms, mania, psychosis…
My vision blurs and clears, my head nods and jerks up as rain splashes the roof and windows. I should have told Marino to ensure someone makes a tent out of a waterproof tarp or plasticized sheets to protect the body from the weather, from the eyes of the curious. To protect me, too. I don’t need to be out in the elements, getting soaked, chilled, filmed by the media…
Television and production trucks were everywhere, and we made sure all of the blinds were drawn. Dark brown carpet. Thick slicks of dark coagulated blood that I could smell as it began to decompose. Sticky on the bottom of my shoes as I moved around inside that room. There was so much blood and I tried so hard not to step in it, to work the crime scene properly. As if it mattered.
But there is no one to punish and no punishment would be enough. And I sit quietly propped up against pillows, the anger tucked in its dark place, perfectly still, looking out with citrine eyes. I see its mighty shape and feel its weight on the foot of my bed.
Marino will have made sure the body is protected.
The anger shifts heavily. The sound and rhythm of the downpour change from fortissimo to pianissimo…
Marino knows what he’s doing.
Fugue from adagio to furioso…
3
A heavy rain splashes the driveway, flooding granite pavers and thrashing trees, the summer storm beating up an angry sky over a city I’m leaving.
I cut off a strip of packing tape, sweating inside my garage, slightly disinhibited, a little weird from alcohol. Richmond Police Detective Pete Marino is trying to get me drunk, to defeat me when I’m weak.
Maybe I should have sex with you and get it over with.
Marking boxes with a Sharpie, I designate areas of my Richmond home, the one I built of reclaimed wood and stone, what was supposed to be a dream meant to last: “living room, master bath, guestroom, kitchen, pantry, laundry room, office…” Anything to make it easier on the other side, having no idea what the other side will be ultimately.
“God I hate moving.” I run the tape dispenser over a box and it sounds like cloth ripping.
“Then why the hell do it all the time?” Marino flirts aggressively, and right now I let him.
“All the time?” I laugh out loud at his ridiculousness.
“And in the same damn city. One neighborhood to the next.” He shrugs, oblivious to what’s really going on with both of us. “Who can keep track?”
“I don’t move without good reason.” I sound like a lawyer.
I am a lawyer. A doctor. A chief.
“Run, run as fast as you can.” Marino’s bloodshot eyes pin me to his emotional board.
I’m a butterfly. A red spotted purple. A tiger swallowtail. A luna moth.
If I let you, you’ll knock the color off my wings. I’ll be a trophy you no longer want. Be my friend. Why isn’t that enough?
I secure another lid to another box, comforted by the downpour outside my open garage door, a mist blowing in, one hundred percent humidity, steamy, dripping. Like a deep hot bath. Like being in the womb. Like a warm body folded into mine, an exchange of warm fluids over skin and deep inside sad lonely places. I need heat and moisture to hug me, to hold me close like my damp clothes clinging as Marino stares from his folding chair, in cut-off sweatpants and a tank top, his big face flushed from lust, wantonness, and beer.
I wonder about the next overbearing detective I’ll have to deal with and I don’t want whoever it is. Someone I have to train and put up with, and respect and loathe and get tired of and lonely for and love in my own way. It could be a woman, I remind myself. Some tough female investigator who assumes she’ll be partners in crime with the new chief medical examiner, assumes who knows what.
I imagine a wolfish woman detective showing up at every death scene and autopsy, appearing in my office and roaring up in her truck or on her motorcycle the way Marino does. A big tattooed suntanned woman in sleeveless denim and a do-rag who wants to eat me to the bone.
I’m being irrational and unfair, bigoted and ignorant. Lucy isn’t competitive and controlling with the women she wants. She doesn’t have tattoos or a do-rag. She isn’t like that. She doesn’t need to be a predator to get what she wants.
I can’t stand these obsessive, intrusive thoughts. What has happened?
Grief grabs the hollow organs of my belly and chest until I almost can’t breathe. I’m overwhelmed by what I’m about to leave, which isn’t really this house or Richmond or Virginia. Benton is gone, murdered five years ago. But as long as I stay right here I feel him in these rooms, on the roads I drive, on stultifying summer days and the raw, bleak ones of winter, as if he’s watching me, is aware of me and every nuance of my being.
I sense him in shifts of air and scents and feel him in shadows that become my moods as a voice from somewhere out of reach says he isn’t dead. Is returning. A nightmare that isn’t real. I’ll wake up and he’ll be right here, his hazel eyes locked on mine, his long tapered fingers touching me. I’ll feel his warmth, his skin, and the perfect shape of his muscles and bones, so recognizable as he holds me, and I’ll be as alive as I’ve ever been.
Then I won’t have to move to some existential dead place where more pieces of me will wither inch by inch, cell by cell, and I envision dense woods beyond my property and the canal and railroad tracks. Down the embankment is a rocky stretch of the James River, a timeless part of the city at the back of Lockgreen, a gated enclave of contemporary homes lived in by those with money who covet privacy and security.
Neighbors I almost never see. Privileged people who never question me about the latest tragedies on my stainless-steel tables. I’m an Italian from Miami, an outsider. The old guard of Richmond’s West End doesn’t know what to make of me. They don’t wave. They don’t stop to say hello. They eye my house as if it’s haunted.
I have walked my streets alone, emerging from the woods at the canal and rusty railroad tracks and wide shallow rocky water, imagining the Civil War and centuries before that the colony farther downriver in Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement. Surrounded by death, I’ve been soothed by the past being present, by beginnings that never end, by my belief that there are reasons and purposes for whatever happens and all of it turns out for the best.