“Well, there’s one in the house. A green one, an old portable on the dining-room table.” He gets up and bends his legs as if his knees ache.
“There’s a green typewriter next door?”
“I figured Benton told you.”
“I guess he couldn’t tell me everything in an hour.”
“Don’t get pissed. He probably couldn’t. You won’t believe all the shit next door. Appears when Fielding moved here he never really moved his shit in. Boxes everywhere. A fucking landfill over there.”
“I doubt he had a portable typewriter. I doubt that’s his.”
“Unless he was in cahoots with the Donahue kid. That’s the theory of where a lot of shit has come from.”
“Not according to his mother. Johnny disliked Jack. So how does it make sense that Jack would have Mrs. Donahue’s typewriter?”
“If it’s hers. We don’t know it is. And then there’s the drugs,” Marino says. “Obviously, Johnny’s been on them since about the time he started taking tae kwon do lessons from Fielding. One plus one equals two, right?”
“We’re going to find out what adds up and what doesn’t. What about stationery or paper?”
“Didn’t see any.”
“Except what seems to be in here.” I remind him it appears some of Erica Donahue’s stationery might have been burned, or maybe all of it was, whatever was left over from the letter someone wrote to me, pretending to be her.
“Listen…” Marino doesn’t finish what he’s about to say.
He doesn’t need to. I know what he’s going to say. He’s going to remind me I can’t be reasonable about Fielding, and Marino thinks he should know, all right. Because of our own history. Marino was around in the early days, too. He remembers when Fielding was my forensic pathology fellow in Richmond, my protege, and in the minds of a lot of people, it seems, a lot more than that.
“This was here just like this?” I then ask, indicating a roll of lead-gray duct tape on the workbench.
“Okay. Sure,” he says as he squats by an open crime scene case on the floor and gets out an evidence bag, because the roll of tape can be fracture-matched to the last strip torn off it. “So tell me how the hell he might have gotten hold of it, and what for?”
He means Fielding. How did Jack Fielding get hold of Erica Donahue’s typewriter, and what was his purpose in writing a letter allegedly from her and having it hand-delivered to me by a driver-for-hire who usually works events like bar mitzvahs and weddings? Did Johnny Donahue give Fielding the typewriter and stationery? If so, why? Maybe Fielding simply manipulated Johnny. Lured him into a trap.
“Maybe a last-ditch effort to frame the kid,” Marino then says, answering his own question and voicing what I’m pondering and about to dismiss as a possibility. “A good question for Benton.”
But Benton is off somewhere, talking on his phone or maybe conferring with his FBI compatriots, maybe with the female agent named Douglas. It bothers me when I think about her, and I hope I’m just paranoid and raw and have no reason to be concerned about the nature of his relationship with Special Agent Douglas. I hope the extra coffee cup in the back of her SUV wasn’t Benton’s, that he hasn’t been riding around with her, spending a lot of time with her while I was at Dover and then before that, in and out of Washington. Not just an enabler and a bad mentor, now I’m a bad wife, it occurs to me. Everything feels wrecked. It feels over with. It feels as if I’m working my own death scene, as if the life I knew somehow didn’t survive while I was away, and I’m investigating, trying to reconstruct what did me in.
“This is what we need to do right now,” I tell Marino. “I assume no one has touched the typewriter, and is it an Olivetti, or do you know?”
“We’ve been pretty tied up over here.” What he’s saying is that the police have more important matters to tend to than an old manual typewriter. “We found the dog in there, like I told you. And a bedroom it appears Fielding was using, and you can tell he was in and out living here, but this is where it happened.” He indicates the outbuilding we’re in. “The typewriter’s in a case on the dining-room table. I opened it to see what was inside, but that’s it.”
“Swab the keys for DNA before you pack it up and transport it to the labs, and I want those swabs going out on the next evidence run the van makes. I want those swabs analyzed first, because they might tell us who wrote that letter to me,” I tell him.
“I think we know who.”
“Then the typewriter goes to Documents so we can compare the typeface to what’s on the letter I got, a cursive typeface, and we’ll analyze the duct tape that’s on the envelope and see if it came from the roll we just found and what trace is on it or DNA or fingerprints or who knows what. Don’t be surprised if it points to the Donahues. If trace is from their house or fingerprints or DNA is from that source.”
“Why?”
“Framing their son.”
“I didn’t know Jack was that damn smart,” Marino says.
“I didn’t say he framed anyone. I’ve not tried and convicted him or anyone,” I reply flatly. “We have his DNA profile and fingerprints for exclusionary purposes, just as we have all of ours. So he should be easy to include or exclude, and any other profiles, and if there are? If we find DNA from more than once source, which we certainly should expect? We run the profiles through CODIS immediately.”
“Sure. If that’s what you want.”
“We run them right away, Marino. Because we know where Jack is. But if anyone else is involved, including the Donahues? We can’t waste time.”
“Sure, Doc. Whatever you want,” Marino says, and I can read his thoughts.
This is Jack Fielding’s house, it’s his Kill Cellar, his Little Shop of Horrors. Why go to all this trouble? But Marino’s not going to say it to me. He’s assuming I’m in denial. I’m holding out the remote and irrational hope that Fielding didn’t kill anyone, that someone else magically was using his property and his belongings and is responsible for all of this, someone other than Fielding, who is the victim and not the monster everyone now believes he is.
“We don’t know if his family’s been here,” I remind Marino patiently and quietly, but in a sobering tone. “His wife, his two little girls. We don’t know who’s been in the house and touched things.”
“Not unless they’ve been coming here from Chicago to stay in this dump.”
“When exactly did they move out of Concord?” That’s where his family was living with him, in a house Fielding had rented that I helped him find.
“Last fall. And it fits with everything,” Marino makes yet one more assumption. “The football player and what happened after Fielding’s family moved back to Chicago and he came here, fixing up this place while he was living in it like a hobo. He could have sent you a goddamn e-mail and let you know it wasn’t working out for him personally around here. That his wife and kids bolted not long after the CFC started taking cases.”
“He didn’t tell me. I’m sorry he didn’t.”
“Yeah, well, don’t say I should have.” Marino seals the roll of duct tape in a plastic evidence bag. “It wasn’t my business. I wasn’t going to start out my new career here by ratting on the staff and telling you that Fielding was the usual fuck-up right out of the box and you sure as hell should have expected it when you thought it was such a brilliant idea to take him back.”
“I should have expected this?” I hold Marino’s bloodshot, resentful stare.