“Maybe someone sent it from a boat that has a router,” Marino suggests.
“Lucy is absolutely sure it was sent from an iPhone. But I suppose it could have been synced with a router, making it easier to access an unsecured network,” I consider, as we pass the curved glass building of the federal courthouse and its public park at Fan Pier.
I check my e-mail again. Nothing, and I write another note to Dan Steward, letting him know I’m en route to a death scene and will have to take care of what I suspect will be a complicated autopsy when I return to the office. Please confirm whether I need to show up at two p.m. as planned, and I continue to hope my presence won’t be required after all. I hope it rather desperately.
It’s absolutely absurd, my being subpoenaed by Channing Lott’s attorney, nothing more than harassment and an attempt to intimidate and humiliate, and of course I don’t say that to Steward. I’ll never again say much at all in e-mails or any written communication, and I dread what I imagine will be tomorrow’s headline:
MEDICAL EXAMINER SAYS LOTT’S WIFE TURNED INTO SOAP
Last March on a late Sunday night, Mildred Lott vanished from their oceanfront mansion in Gloucester, some thirty miles north of here. Footage from infrared security cameras shows her opening a door and emerging from the house into the backyard at almost ten o’clock at night. It was very dark out, and she was in a bathrobe and slippers, walking toward the seawall while apparently talking to someone, I’ve been told. The security recording shows that she did not return to the house, and the next morning when her driver appeared to take her to an appointment, she did not answer the door or her phone. Walking around back, he discovered a door wide open and that the alarm system wasn’t set.
Deleted e-mails recovered by the police revealed a cyber-train that led directly to Channing Lott, whose wife isn’t my case. Her body hasn’t been found, and the sole reason for my being summoned to court today is an electronic communication, one I didn’t think twice about last spring, when Dan Steward wanted to know if a body were dumped off the coast of Gloucester that time of year, how long would it take to completely decompose and what would happen to the bones.
I replied that for a while the coldness of the water would actually preserve the body, although fish and other marine life would do some damage. I said it could take as long as a year for saponification, for the body to form adipocere, which is caused by the anaerobic bacterial hydrolysis of fat in tissue. In other words, I made the mistake of saying in my e-mail that a body underwater for a long period of time rather much turns into soap, and it is this comment that Channing Lott’s lawyer wants to confront me with in court today.
“If I end up having to appear at two, it probably is a good idea if you’re with me. I agree,” I say to Marino, because I already know what’s going to happen—that I won’t get out of it. “Maybe Bryce should be with us. I worry there will be a lot of media.”
“What an idiot,” Marino says. “With all his money and he stiffs the hit man?”
“That’s not why I’ve been subpoenaed or my point,” I reply, somewhat impatiently.
“Some dirtbag he hires off the Internet, Craigslist, whatever, and he wonders why he got caught,” Marino says.
“The point I’m making is the abuse of the judicial system,” I reply. “A perverting of fairness.”
We are past the seaport and the massive stone fortification Fort Independence, which protected Boston from the British in the War of 1812, swerving away from Deer Island, where waste-treatment plant sludge digesters look like eggs. The gray sandy shoreline of Hull curves around a harbor packed with small boats, and a graceful white windmill rises from the hills. I let Marino know he should be careful that the same fate doesn’t befall him that has befallen me.
“It’s a sobering reminder of what can happen,” I say to him.
The defense wants me in court because Channing Lott wants me there, for no reason other than to force me into something, which Lott legally has the right to do. Any report generated by any forensic expert no longer speaks for itself unless both sides agree that the forensic scientist, the medical examiner, the scene investigator doesn’t need to appear in person. While I understand the logic of the Supreme Court’s decision that a document can’t be cross-examined, only a human being can, what has occurred in the wake of the ruling is that overworked, underpaid experts are being abused and run ragged.
Any time we generate a document that might end up in court, one side or the other can demand we take the witness stand, even if the written words are nothing more than a voice-recognition text message or a handwritten note on a Post-it. As a result, some key members of my staff have begun ducking cases. If they dodge a crime scene or an autopsy or don’t offer their expert opinion or even a glib remark, there’s no chance they’ll be subpoenaed, which is yet another reason why I don’t like the idea that Marino is allowing the death investigator on call to go home so he can sleep over at the CFC.
“If one isn’t careful,” I’m saying to him, “one might find he never has time to do his work anymore. I’m being dragged to court today because of an e-mail I sent to Steward when he asked my opinion and nothing more. My opinion and an admittedly careless comment in an e-mail and it’s all discoverable, every keystroke. And you wonder why I don’t involve myself personally in Twitter and things like that. Anything can and will be used against you.”
That’s all I intend to say to him while we’re on a Coast Guard boat with a crew who can hear every word. When the timing is right, Marino and I will have a conversation about ornamenting and whatever else is going on in his life that has resulted in his turning the CFC’s investigative division into a Motel 6 because he can’t or won’t go home.
“Coming up!” our pilot, Labella, lets us know as he monitors the depth sounder, and other vessels hail over the radio.
The water opens into a fan-shaped expanse that is bordered by the north and south channels and their many islands, and we pass green channel markers on our right, the boat rising and falling, its thrust pushing me back in my chair.
“It’s going to be a cluster fuck,” Marino says, when the fireboat comes into view, its emergency lights flashing red, a news helicopter hovering overhead. “Who the hell alerted the media?”
“Scanners,” says Labella, without turning around in his chair. “Reporters monitor our freqs out here on the water just like they do on land.”
He announces he’s bringing back the speed as we approach the James S. Damrell, a seventy-foot FireStorm with a flat-planed red-and-white hull and raked forward windshields, and bow- and roof-mounted fire guns. Surrounding it are a shark-gray police Zodiac, fishing and pleasure boats, and a tall ship with red sails furled, the cops and the curious, or maybe it is both, and I don’t look forward to what I must do, especially when there is an audience. I think of the indignity of being dumped like garbage or lost at sea and being gawked at.
A liquefied natural-gas tanker painted parakeet green moves at a glacier’s pace, giving the flashing fireboat a wide berth, and Labella steers us closer and cuts the engines to idle as I recognize the marine biologist from the photograph Marino showed me. Pamela Quick and half a dozen marine animal rescuers crowd the lower deck and the dive platform, attending to what looks like a primitive cross between a reptile and a bird, some evolutionary manifestation from the dinosaur age, when life as we know it began to exist on earth.
The leatherback is at least nine, possibly ten, feet in length, his throat puffing out unhappily, his powerful front flippers pinned to his black leathery sides with a yellow harness that crisscrosses his carapace like a straitjacket. Lashed to the back of the platform and rocking on the water is an inflated float bag with a wooden ramp on top that I assume was used to pull the monstrous creature on board.