“I think that about does it.” Lucy gets up from the bed. “You might want to make sure I didn’t miss anything,” she says to me.
Wastebaskets are overflowing, and my bags are packed and lined up by a wall, the closet door open wide, nothing inside but empty hangers. Computer equipment, printed files, journal articles, and books are gone from my desk, and there is nothing in the dirty-clothes hamper or bathroom or in the dresser drawers I check. I open the small refrigerator, and it is empty and has been wiped clean. While she and Marino begin carrying my belongings out, I enter Briggs’s number into my iPhone. I look out at the three-story stucco building on the other side of the parking lot, at the large plate-glass window in the middle of the third floor. Last night I was in that suite with him and other colleagues, watching the game, and life was good. We cheered for the New Orleans Saints and ourselves, and we toasted the Pentagon and its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, which had made CT-assisted virtual autopsies possible at Dover and now at the CFC. We celebrated mission accomplished, a job well done, and now this, as if last night wasn’t real, as if I dreamed it.
I take a deep breath and press send on my iPhone, going hollow inside. Briggs can’t be happy with me. Images flash on the wall-mounted flat-screen TV in his living room, and then he walks past the glass, dressed in the combat uniform of the army, green and sandy brown with a mandarin collar, what he typically wears when he’s not in the morgue or at a scene. I watch him answer his phone and return to his big window, where he stands, looking directly at me. From a distance we are face-to-face, an expanse of tarmac and parked cars between the armed forces chief medical examiner and me, as if we’re about to have a standoff.
“Colonel.” His voice greets me somberly.
“I just heard. And I assure you I’m taking care of this, will be on the helicopter within the hour.”
“You know what I always say,” his deep, authoritative voice sounds in my earpiece, and I try to detect the degree of his bad mood and what he’s going to do. “There’s an answer to everything. The problem is finding it and figuring out the best way to do that. The proper and appropriate way to do that.” He’s cool. He’s cautious. He’s very serious. “We’ll do this another time,” he adds.
He means the final briefing we were scheduled to have. I’m sure he also means CNN, and I wonder what Marino told him. What exactly did he say?
“I agree, John. Everything should be canceled.”
“It has been.”
“Which is smart.” I’m matter-of-fact. I won’t let him sense my insecurities, and I know he sniffs for them. I know damn well he does. “My first priority is to determine if the information reported to me is correct. Because I don’t see how it can be.”
“Not a good time for you to go on the air. I don’t need Rockman to tell us that.”
Rockman is the press secretary. Briggs doesn’t need to talk to him because he already has. I’m sure of it.
“I understand,” I reply.
“Remarkable timing. If I was paranoid, I might just think someone has orchestrated some sort of bizarre sabotage.”
“Based on what I’ve been told, I don’t see how that would be possible.”
“I said if I was paranoid,” Briggs replies, and from where I stand, I can make out his formidable sturdy shape but can’t see the expression on his face. I don’t need to see it. He’s not smiling. His gray eyes are galvanized steel.
“The timing is either a coincidence or it’s not,” I say. “The basic tenet in criminal investigations, John. It’s always one or the other.”
“Let’s not trivialize this.”
“I’m doing anything but.”
“If a living person was put in your damn cooler, I can’t think of much worse,” he says flatly.
“We don’t know—”
“It’s just a damn shame after all this.” As if everything we’ve built over the past few years is on the precipice of ruin.
“We don’t know that what’s been reported is accurate—” I start to say.
“I think it would be best if we bring the body here,” he interrupts again. “AFDIL can work on the identification. Rockman will make sure the situation is well contained. We’ve got everything we need right here.”
I’m stunned. Briggs wants to send a plane to Hanscom Field, the air force base affiliated with the CFC. He wants the Armed Forces DNA Identification Lab and probably other military labs and someone other than me to handle whatever has happened, because he doesn’t think I’m competent. He doesn’t trust me.
“We don’t know if we’re talking about federal jurisdiction,” I remind him. “Unless you know something I don’t.”
“Look. I’m trying to do what’s best for all involved.” Briggs has his hands behind his back, his legs slightly spread, staring across the parking lot at me. “I’m suggesting we can dispatch a C-Seventeen to Hanscom. We can have the body here by midnight. The CFC is a port mortuary, too, and that’s what port mortuaries do.”
“That’s not what port mortuaries do. The point isn’t for bodies to be received, then transferred elsewhere for autopsies and lab analysis. The CFC was never intended to be a first screening for Dover, a preliminary check before the experts step in. That was never my mandate, and it wasn’t the agreement when thirty million dollars was spent on the facility in Cambridge.”
“You should just stay at Dover, Kay, and we’ll bring the body here.”
“I’m requesting you refrain from intervening, John. Right now this case is the jurisdiction of the chief medical examiner of Massachusetts. Please don’t challenge me or my authority.”
A long pause, then he states rather than asks, “You really want that responsibility.”
“It’s mine whether I want it or not.”
“I’m trying to protect you. I’ve been trying.”
“Don’t.” That’s not what he’s trying. He doesn’t have confidence in me.
“I can deploy Captain Avallone to help. It’s not a bad idea.”
I can’t believe he would suggest that, either. “That won’t be necessary,” I reply firmly. “The CFC is perfectly capable of handling this.”
“I’m on the record as having offered.”
On the record with whom? It occurs to me uncannily that someone else is on the line or within earshot. Briggs is still standing in front of his window. I can’t tell if anyone else might be in the suite with him.
“Whatever you decide,” he then says. “I’m not going to step on you. Call me as soon as you know something. Wake me up if you have to.” He doesn’t say good-bye or good luck or it was nice having me here for half a year.
2
Lucy and Marino have left my room. My suitcases, rucksacks, and Bankers Boxes are gone, and there is nothing left. It is as if I was never here, and I feel alone in a way I haven’t for years, maybe decades.
I look around one last time, making sure nothing has been forgotten, my attention wandering past the microwave, the small refrigerator-freezer and coffeemaker, the windows with their view of the parking lot and Briggs’s lighted suite, and beyond, the black sky over the void of the empty golf course. Thick clouds pass over the oblong moon, and it glows on and off like a signal lantern, as if telling me what is coming down the tracks and if I should stop or go, and I can’t see the stars at all. I worry that the bad weather is moving fast, carried on the same strong south wind that brings in the big planes and their sad cargo. I should hurry, but I’m distracted by the bathroom mirror, by the person in it, and I pause to look at myself in the glare of fluorescent lights. Who are you now? Who really?