“We don’t know what Eli knew. But he likely was aware of Jack and his drugs, obviously was well enough acquainted with him to have one of his guns. That must have been a bad feeling when Jack found out from the Cambridge police that the dead man had a Glock on him with an eradicated serial number.”
“Sounds like Marino’s filled you in. Told you all this as if it’s an irrefutable case history. And it’s not. It’s a theory. We don’t have tangible evidence that Jack killed anyone.”
“He knew he was in trouble. That much I think is safe to say,” Briggs replies.
“As much as anything is safe to say. I agree he wouldn’t have removed the Glock from the lab, had he not feared he had a problem. My question is whether he was covering for himself or for someone else.”
“He knew damn well we’d restore the serial number, that we’d trace the pistol to him.”
“‘We,’” I reply. “I’ve been hearing that word a lot of late.”
“I know how you feel about it.” Briggs plants his hands on the windowsill and leans forward, as if his lower back aches. “You think I’m trying to take something away from you. You believe it.” He smiles grimly. “Captain Avallone came here last fall.”
“Someone that junior? So it wouldn’t raise suspicions?”
“Exactly, to appear casual, an informal drop-in while she was on her way somewhere else. When the fact is we were hearing things we didn’t like about how your second in command was running the CFC. And I don’t need to tell you we have a vested interest. The AFME does, DoD does, a lot of people do. It isn’t yours to ruin.”
“It isn’t mine at all,” I answer. “Obviously, I did a terrible job before I even started—”
“You haven’t done a terrible job,” he cuts me off. “I’m just as much to blame. You picked Jack or, better put, gave in to his wish to come back, and I didn’t get in your way, and I sure as hell should have. I didn’t want to step on you, and I should have stepped all over you about that decision you made. I figured in four months you’d be home, and I honestly didn’t imagine the havoc that man could cause in such a short period of time, but he was mixed up with the Otwahl Laboratory Rat Pack, doing drugs and losing it.”
“Is that why you delayed my leaving Dover? So you could find time to replace the leadership at the CFC? Find time to replace me?” I say it as bravely as I can.
“The opposite. To keep you out of it. I didn’t want you tarred by it. I delayed you as many times as I could without an out-and-out abduction, and then the father of the bride in London gets the damn swine flu, and a dead body starts bleeding. And your niece shows up in her chopper at Dover, and I tried to get you to stay by offering to transport the body to Dover, but you wouldn’t, and that was the end of it. And here we are again.”
“Yes, again.”
“We’ve been in our messes before. And we probably will again.”
“You didn’t send Lucy to pick me up.”
“I did not. And I don’t think she’s likely to take orders from me. Thank God she never thought about enlisting. Would end up in Leavenworth.”
“You didn’t ask her to bug my office.”
“A suggestion made in passing so we could know exactly what Jack was doing.”
“Your making a suggestion in passing is like a cannibal offhandedly inviting someone to dinner,” I reply.
“Quite an analogy.”
“People pay attention to your suggestions, and you know it.”
“Lucy pays attention if it suits her.”
“What about Captain Avallone? Did she conspire with Jack, conspire against me?”
“Never. I told you why she showed up last November for her tour. She’s quite loyal to you.”
“So loyal that she told Jack about Cape Town.” I surprise myself by saying it out loud.
“That never happened. Sophia knows nothing about Cape Town.”
“Then how did Julia Gabriel know?”
“When she was yelling at you? I see,” he says, as if I’ve just answered a question I didn’t know he’d asked. “I stopped outside your door to have a word with you and could hear you talking on the phone, could hear you were somewhat intensely involved. She talked to me, too. Talked to a number of people after getting word on the grapevine that we routinely extract semen at Dover, that every medical examiner office does this routinely, which is utter bullshit. We would never do such a thing unless it was absolutely proper and approved. She got this impression because Jack was covertly doing that at the CFC and had done so in the case of the man who got killed in a Boston taxicab on his wedding day. Someone connected to Mrs. Gabriel’s son. And I think you can understand how she got the idea that her son Peter should get the same special treatment.”
“She knows nothing about me personally. She didn’t mean it personally. You’re sure.”
“Why would you believe these negative things about you personally?” he says.
“I think you know why, John.”
“No damn way she was referring to anything specific. She’s an angry, militant woman and was just venting when she called you the same names she called me, called several other people at Dover. Bigots. Racists. Nazis. Fascists. A lot of staff got christened a lot of ugly names that morning.”
Briggs steps back away from the window and collects his laptop off the sill, his way of saying he has to go. He can’t have a conversation that lasts more than twenty minutes, and in fact the one we just had is lengthy for him and has tried his patience and gotten too close to too many things.
“One favor you could do for me that would be greatly appreciated,” he says. “Please stop telling people I thought MORT was the best thing since sliced bread.”
Benton, I think. I guess the two of them have gotten quite cozy.
“Not so, but I understand your remembering it that way, and I’m sorry we butted heads about it,” Briggs goes on. “However, given a choice of a robot dragging a dead body off the battlefield and a living person risking his life and limb to do it? That’s what I call a Sophie’s choice. No good choice, only two bad ones. You weren’t right, and I wasn’t, either.”
“Then we’ll leave it at that,” I answer. “Both of us made bad decisions.”
“It’s not like we hadn’t made them before,” he mutters.
He walks with me out of the sea captain’s house, passing through rooms I’ve already been in. Every space seems empty and depressing, as if there never was anybody home. It doesn’t feel that Fielding ever lived here, just parked himself as he worked demonically on his renovations and labored secretly in his cellar, and I just don’t know what drove him. Maybe it was money. He’d always wanted money and was never going to get it in our trade, and that bothered him about me, too. I do better than most. I plan well, and Benton has his inheritance, and then there is Lucy, who is obscenely rich from computer technologies she’s been selling since she was no older than the neuroterrorists Briggs just talked about. Thank God Lucy’s inventions are legal, as best I know.
She’s inside the CFC truck with Marino and Benton, and the yellow suits and hard hats are off, and everyone looks tired. Anne has driven off in the van again, making another delivery to the labs while more evidence waits for her here, white boxes filled with white paper evidence bags.
“There’s a package for you in your car,” Briggs says to me in front of the others. “The latest, greatest, level-four-A armor, specifically designed for females in theater, which would be fine if you ladies would bother with the plates.”
“If the vest isn’t comfortable,” I start to say.
“I think it is, but I’m built a little different from you. Problem’s going to be if it won’t completely close on the sides. We’ve seen that too many times, and the projectile finds that one damn opening.”