“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’etre, 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 fragrances. 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.