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“Put on your hard hat before you go down. There’s a lot of shit hanging from the ceilings, like all these damn lights strung up like it’s Christmas. I got to go back out to the truck, and I know you need a minute.”

I adjust the ratchet of my hard hat, making it tighter, and the reason Marino isn’t going into the cellar with me isn’t because I need a minute. It isn’t because he’s sensitive enough to offer me a chance to deal with what’s down there without him by my side, breathing down my neck. That might be what he’s talked himself into, but as I listen to him swishing his boots in the tubs just outside the door, stepping in and out of the water, I can only imagine how distasteful a scene like this must be to him. It has little to do with the unpleasantness of body fluids thawing and breaking down or even his squeamishness about hepatitis or HIV or some other virus and everything to do with how the body fluids got here. Marino’s ablution in the plastic tubs filled with water and dish-washing fluid are his attempt to cleanse himself of the guilt I know he feels.

He never saw Fielding doing any of it, and that’s the problem Marino faces. The way he would think about it is he should have noticed, and as I’ve explained to Benton while we were driving here and then explained to Marino over the phone, the extraction of sperm isn’t much different from a vasectomy, except when such a procedure is performed on a dead body, it’s even quicker and simpler, for obvious reasons. No local anesthesia is needed, and the doctor doesn’t have to be concerned with how the patient is feeling or if he might have second thoughts or any other emotional response.

All Fielding had to do was make a small puncture on one side of the scrotum and inject a needle into the vas deferens to extract sperm. He could have done this in minutes. He probably didn’t do it during the autopsy but before it by going into the cooler when nobody was around, making certain he got to the body as quickly after death as possible, which in retrospect might explain why he noticed the man from Norton’s Woods was bleeding before anybody else did. Fielding went into the cooler first thing when he got to the building early Monday morning to acquire his latest involuntary sperm donation, and that’s when he noticed blood in the tray under the body bag. So he walked rapidly down the corridor and notified Anne and Ollie.

If anybody would have noticed something like this going on during the six months I was at Dover it was Anne, I told Marino. She never saw what Fielding was doing or had a clue, and we know he extracted sperm from at least a hundred patients based on what has been found in a freezer in the cellar and what’s broken all over the floor, potentially a hundred thousand dollars, maybe much more, depending on what he charged and if he did it on a sliding scale, taking into account what the family or other interested party could afford. Liquid gold, as cops are calling what Fielding was selling on a black market of his own creation, and I can’t stop thinking about his choice of Eli as an involuntary donor, assuming this was Fielding’s intention, and we’ll never really know.

But at the time Fielding went into the cooler yesterday morning, there was only one young male body fresh enough to be a suitable candidate for a sperm extraction, and that was Eli Goldman. The other male case was elderly, and it’s highly unlikely he had loved ones who might be interested in buying his semen, and a third case was a female. If Fielding murdered Eli with the injection knife, would he then be so brazen and reckless as to take the young man’s sperm, and who was he planning to sell it to without incriminating himself? If he’d tried something like that, he may as well have confessed to the homicide.

It continues to tug at my thoughts that Fielding didn’t know who the unidentified dead young male was when he was notified about the case on Sunday afternoon. Fielding didn’t bother going to the scene, wasn’t interested, and had no reason at that time to be interested. I continue to suspect he didn’t have a clue until he walked into the cooler, and then he recognized Eli Goldman because they had a connection somehow. Maybe it was drugs, and that’s why Eli had one of Fielding’s guns. Maybe Fielding had given or sold the Glock to Eli. For sure someone did. Drugs, the gun, maybe something else. If only I could have been in Fielding’s mind when he walked into the cooler at shortly after seven yesterday morning. Then I would know. I would know everything.

I move a hanging light out of my way so it doesn’t knock my hard hat as I go down stone steps in my bulky yellow suit and big rubber boots.

A cold sweat is rolling down my sides, and I am worrying about Briggs and what it will be like when I’m confronted with him, and I’m worrying about a greyhound named Sock. I am worrying about everything I can possibly worry about because I can’t bear what I’m about to see, but it is better this way, and as much as I complain about Marino, he really did do the right thing. I wouldn’t have wanted Fielding’s body transported to the CFC. I wouldn’t want to see it for the first time in a pouch on a steel gurney or tray. Marino knows me well enough to decide that given the choice, I would demand to see Fielding the way he died, to satisfy myself that it was exactly as it appears, and that what Briggs determined when he examined the body hours earlier is the same thing I observe and that Briggs and I share the same opinion about Fielding’s cause and manner of death.

The cellar is whitewashed stone with a vaulted stone ceiling and no windows, and it is too small a space for so many people, all of them dressed the way I am, in bright yellow with thick black gloves and green rubber boots and bright yellow hard hats. Some people have on face shields, others surgical masks, and I recognize my own scientists, three from the DNA lab, who are swabbing an area of the stone floor that is littered with shattered glass test tubes and their black plastic stoppers. Nearby is the space heater Marino mentioned, and an upright stainless-steel laboratory cryogenic freezer, the same make and model that we use in labs where we have to store biological samples at ultra-low temperatures.

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.