As I wait for Marino and Lucy, I’m reminded I’m not dressed for New England. My tactical jacket was perfectly adequate in Delaware, but now I’m thoroughly chilled. I try not to think about how good it would be to sit in front of the fire with a single-malt Scotch or small-batch bourbon, to catch up with Benton about things other than tragedy and betrayal and enemies with long memories, to get away from everyone. I want to drink and talk honestly with my husband, to put aside games and subterfuge and not wonder what he knows. I crave a normal time with him, but we don’t know what that is. Even when we make love we have our secrets and nothing is normal.
“No updates except Lawless.” Marino answers a question no one asked as the bay door clanks down behind us. “He e-mailed scene photographs—finally. But says no luck with the dog. No one’s called to report a lost greyhound.”
“What greyhound?” Benton asks.
I was too busy describing MORT and didn’t mention much else I saw on the video clips. I feel foolish. “Norton’s Woods,” I reply. “A black-and-white greyhound named Sock that apparently ran off while the EMTs were busy with our case.”
“How do you know his name is Sock?”
I explain it to him as I hold my thumb over the glass sensor of the biometric lock so it can scan my fingerprint. Opening the door that leads into the lower level of the building, I mention that the dog might have a microchip that could supply useful information about the owner’s identification. Some rescue groups automatically microchip former racing greyhounds before putting them up for adoption, I add.
“That’s interesting,” Benton says. “I think I saw them.”
“He stared right at you as you were pulling out of the driveway in your sports car about three-fifteen yesterday afternoon,” Lucy tells him as we enter the processing area, an open space with a security office, a digital floor scale, and a wall of massive stainless-steel doors that open into cooler rooms and a walk-in freezer.
“What are you talking about?” Benton asks my niece.
“All that time in the car driving through a blizzard and you didn’t catch him up on things?” Lucy says to me, and she’s not easy to be around when she gets like this.
I feel a prick of annoyance even though she’s right. She knows you, too, enters my mind. She knows you just as well as you know her. She knows damn well when something is bothering me that I stubbornly keep to myself, and I’ve been bothered and feeling stubborn since I left Dover. It was stupid of me not to go into the sort of detail that Benton can do something with. I don’t know of anyone more psychologically astute, and he would have plenty to say about the minutiae picked up by the recorders concealed inside the dead man’s headphones.
Instead, I obsessed about DARPA because I was really obsessing about Briggs. I can’t get past what happened earlier today, about what happened decades ago, about how what he caused never seems to end. He knows about that dark place in my past, a place I take no one, and a part of me will never forgive him for creating that place. It was his idea for me to go to Cape Town. It was his goddamn brilliant plan.
“He and the greyhound walked right past your driveway just minutes before he died,” Lucy is telling Benton, but her gaze is steady on me. “If you hadn’t left, you would have heard the sirens. You probably would have headed over there to see what was going on and maybe would have some useful information for us.”
She looks at me as if she is looking at the dark place. It’s not possible she could know about it, I reassure myself. I’ve never told her, never told Benton or Marino or anyone. The documents were destroyed except for what I have. Briggs promised that decades ago when I left the AFIP and moved to Virginia, and I already knew reports were missing without being told. Lucy doesn’t have the combination to my safe, I remind myself. Benton doesn’t. No one does.
“If you drop by my lab,” Lucy is saying to Benton, “I’ll show the video clips to you.”
“You haven’t seen them,” I say to Benton, because I’m not sure. He’s acting as if he hasn’t seen them, but I don’t know if it’s just more of the same, more secrets.
“I haven’t,” he answers, and it sounds like the truth. “But I want to, and I will.”
“Weird you’re in them,” Lucy says to him. “Your house is in them. Really weird. Sort of freaked me out when I saw it.”
The night security guard sits behind his glass window, and he nods at us but doesn’t get up from his desk. His name is Ron, a big, muscular dark-skinned man with closely shorn hair and unfriendly eyes. He seems afraid of me or skeptical, and it’s obvious he’s been instructed to maintain his post, not to be sociable, no matter who it is. I can only imagine the stories he’s heard, and Fielding enters my thoughts again. What has happened to him? What trouble has he caused? How much has he hurt this place?
I walk over to the security guard’s window and check the sign-in log. Since three p.m., three bodies have come in: a motor-vehicle fatality, a gunshot homicide, and an asphyxiation by plastic bag that is undetermined.
“Is Dr. Fielding here?” I ask Ron.
Retired marine corps military police, he is always neat and proud in his midnight-blue uniform with American flag and AFME patches on the shoulders and a brass CFC security shield pinned to his shirt. His face is wary and not the least bit warm behind his glass partition as he answers that he hasn’t seen Fielding. He tells me that Anne and Ollie are here but no one else. Not even the on-call death investigator is in. Janelle, he informs me in a monotone, and every other word is ma’am, and I’m reminded of how cold and condescending ma’am this and ma’am that can sound and how tired I got of hearing it at Dover. Janelle is working from home because of the weather, Ron reports. Apparently, Fielding told her that was okay, even though it’s not. That is against the rules I established. On-call investigators don’t work from home.
“We’ll be in the x-ray room,” I inform Ron. “If anybody else shows up, you can find us in there. But unless it’s Dr. Fielding, I need to know who it is and give clearance. Actually, I probably should know if Dr. Fielding shows up, too. You know what, no matter who it is, I need to know.”
“If Dr. Fielding comes in you want me to call, ma’am. To alert you,” Ron repeats, as if he’s not sure that’s what I meant, or maybe he’s arguing.
“Affirmative,” I make myself clear. “No one should just walk in, doesn’t matter if they work here. Until I tell you otherwise. I want everything airtight right now.”
“I understand, ma’am.”
“Any calls from the media? Any sign of them?”
“I keep looking, ma’am.” Mounted on three walls are monitors, each split into quadrants that are constantly rotating images picked up by security cameras outside the building and in strategic areas such as the bays, corridors, elevators, lobby, and all doors leading into the building. “I know there’s some concern about the man found in the park.” Ron looks past me at Marino, as if the two of them have an understanding.
“Well, you know where we’ll be for now.” I open another door. “Thank you.”
A long white hallway with a gray tile floor leads to a series of rooms located in a logical order that facilitates the flow of our work. The first stop is ID, where bodies are photographed and fingerprinted and personal effects not taken by the police are removed and secured in lockers. Next is large-scale x-ray, which includes the CT scanner, and beyond that are the autopsy room, the soiled room, the anteroom, the changing rooms, the locker rooms, the anthropology lab, the Bio4 containment lab reserved for suspected infectious or contaminated cases. The corridor wraps around in a circle that ends where it began, at the receiving bay.