But as I sit up in bed and talk on the phone it’s exactly as it happened and I can’t block out what I saw. The bodies and the blood. Brass cartridge cases were bright like pennies scattered over floors inside that red brick elementary school, all of it indelibly vivid as if I’m still there.
Twenty-seven autopsies, most of them children, and when I pulled off my bloody scrubs and stepped into the shower I refused to think about what I’d just done.
I switched channels. I compartmentalized, having learned long years ago not to see destroyed human flesh after I’ve had my hands in it. I willed the images to stay where I left them at the scene, in the autopsy room and out of my thoughts. Obviously I failed. By the time I got home this past Saturday night I had a fever and ached all over as if something evil had infected me. My usual barriers had been breached. I’d offered my help to Connecticut’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and no good deed goes unpunished. There’s a penalty for trying to do what’s right. The dark forces don’t like it, and stress will make you sick.
“She claimed she went over to make sure Gail wasn’t there,” Marino is saying, “and then got security to check inside the condo but there was no sign of her or that she’d ever come home from the bar.”
I comment that she must be familiar to people who work at Gail Shipton’s apartment building because security wouldn’t open up a door for just anyone, and as I’m saying all this my attention drifts to the ridiculous mountain of FedEx packages still unopened by the sofa on the other side of the bedroom. I’m reminded why it’s not a good thing if I’m isolated for days and too sick to work or cook or leave the house and afraid to be alone with my thoughts. I will distract myself and I did.
A vintage Harley-Davidson leather riding vest and skull belt buckle are for Marino, and there’s Hermès cologne and Jeff Deegan bracelets for Lucy and Janet, and for my husband Benton a titanium watch with a carbon-fiber face that Breguet doesn’t make anymore. His birthday is tomorrow, five days before Christmas, and it’s very hard to shop for him and there’s not much he needs or doesn’t have.
There is an abundance of gifts to wrap for my mother and my sister, and for our housekeeper Rosa and members of my staff, and all sorts of things for Sock and also for Lucy’s bulldog and my chief of staff’s cat. I’m not sure what the hell got into me when I was sick in bed, ordering like mad off the Internet, and I’ll blame it on my fever. I’m sure to hear all about the typically sensible and reserved Kay Scarpetta and her wild holiday spending spree. Lucy in particular won’t let me live it down.
“Gail’s not answering her cell phone, e-mails, texts,” Marino continues as rain slashes the windows, clicking loudly against glass. “Nothing posted on Facebook, Twitter, or whatever, and her physical description is consistent with the dead lady and that’s the bigger point. I’m thinking she might have been abducted, was held somewhere, her body wrapped in a sheet and dumped. I wouldn’t bother you under the circumstances but I know how you are.”
He does know how I am and I’m not driving myself to MIT or anywhere, not when I’ve been in virtual quarantine for the past five days. I tell him that. I’m stubborn and all business with my former lead investigator. Yes, former, I think.
“How you feeling? I told you not to get a flu shot. That’s probably why you got sick,” he says.
“You can’t get sick from a dead virus.”
“Well, the only two times I had a flu shot I came down with the flu, was sick as a damn dog. I’m glad you sound better.” Marino pretends to care because he has a purpose for me.
“I suppose it’s all relative. I could be better. I could be worse.”
“In other words, you’re pissed at me. We may as well put it on the table.”
“I was talking about my health.”
To say I’m pissed would trivialize what I feel right now. Marino hasn’t seemed to consider what his walking off the job might say about me, the chief medical examiner of Massachusetts and director of the Cambridge Forensic Center, the CFC. For the past ten years he’s been my head of investigations and suddenly he professionally divorces me. I can imagine what cops in particular will say or already are saying.
I anticipate being doubted at scenes, at my office, in the autopsy room, and on the witness stand. I imagine being second-guessed when in fact none of this is about me. It’s all about Marino and a mid-life crisis he’s been afflicted with for as long as I’ve known him. Let’s be clear, I would tell the world, if I were indiscreet, that Pete Marino has suffered poor self-esteem and identity confusion since the day he was born to an abusive alcoholic father and weak, submissive mother in a bad part of New Jersey.
I’m a woman out of his reach and the one he punishes, possibly the love of his life and for sure his best friend. His motivation is neither fair nor rational for ringing me up at this hour when he knows I’ve been home with the flu, so sick that at one point I worried I was dying and it began drifting through my mind, This is it, what it’s like.
2
During a feverish epiphany I saw the meaning of everything, life the colliding of God particles that make up all matter in the universe and death the absolute reverse of it. When I spiked a temperature of 103.8 it became even clearer, explained simply and eloquently by the hooded man at the foot of my bed.
If only I’d written down what he said, the elusive formula for nature giving mass and death taking it away, all of creation since the Big Bang measured by the products of decay. Rust, dirt, sickness, insanity, chaos, corruption, lies, rot, ruin, shed cells, dead cells, atrophy, stenches, sweat, waste, dust to dust, that at a subatomic level interact and create new mass, and this goes on infinitely. I couldn’t see his face but I know it was compelling and kind as he spoke to me scientifically, poetically, backlit by fire that gave off no heat.
During moments of astonishing clarity I realized what we mean when we talk of forbidden fruit and original sin, and walking into the light and streets paved in gold, of extraterrestrials, auras, ghosts, and paradise and hell and reincarnation, of being healed or raised from the dead, of coming back as a raven, a cat, a hunchback, an angel. A recycling crystalline in its precision and prismatic beauty was revealed to me. The plan of God the Supreme Physicist, who is merciful, just, and funny. Who is creative. Who is all of us.
I saw and I knew. I possessed perfect Truth. Then life reasserted itself, pulled Truth right out from under me, and I’m still here, held down by gravity. An amnesiac. I can’t recall or share what at last I could explain to devastated people after I’ve taken care of their dead. I’m clinical at best when I answer the questions they ask, always the same ones.
Why? Why? Why!
How could someone do something like this?
I’ve never had a good explanation. But there is one and I knew it fleetingly. What I’ve always wanted to say was on the tip of my tongue, then I came to and what I knew was replaced by the job I’d just done. The unthinkable images no one should ever see. Blood and brass in a hallway lined with bulletin boards decorated for the holidays. And then inside that classroom. The children I couldn’t save. The parents I couldn’t comfort. The reassurances I couldn’t give.
Did they suffer?
How quick would it have been?
It’s the flu doing this, I tell myself. There’s nothing I haven’t seen and can’t deal with and I feel the anger stir, the sleeping dragon within.