The flashgun of a camera goes off, and then goes off again as a broad-shouldered figure in blaze yellow photographs the one area of whitewashed wall down here that is blackened and foul, where a total station on a bright yellow tripod has been set up, and I’m guessing the electro-optical distance-measuring system has already mapped the scene, recording the coordinate data of every feature, including what Colonel Pruitt is photographing. He catches me looking at him and lowers the camera to his side as I walk over to a wall where I smell death, the faintest musty pungent stench of blood that has broken down and dried over months in a sunless, cold environment. I smell mildew. I smell dust, and I notice piles of torn dirty carpet and plywood nearby against a different wall, and I can tell by dust and dirt on the white floor that the carpet and wood was recently dragged to where it is.
Bolted into stone at the height of my head are a series of steel screw pin anchor shackles that I associate with sling assemblies used in hoisting. Based on coils of rope, grease guns, clamps, a cargo trolley, and grab hooks and swivel rings in the ceiling, I surmise that Fielding devised a creative rig for changing out the heavy tanks of liquid nitrogen, and at some point the system was perverted into one I suspect he never intended when he began extracting semen and selling it.
“From what I’m able to figure out so far, the main thing used was the splitting maul, which would account for both the blunt-force and cutting injuries,” Pruitt begins without so much as hello, as if our meeting here is normal, nothing more than a continuum of our time together at Dover. “Basically, a long-handled sledgehammer on one side, the other side sharp like an ax. It was under carpet and wood, along with a Boston College letter jacket, a pair of sneakers, other items of clothing that we think were Wally Jamison’s. This entire area was under that stuff over there.” He indicates the carpet and wood that was moved, what I surmise was used to cover the crime scene. “All of it, including the splitting maul, of course, has been packaged and sent to your place already. Did you see the weapon yet?” Pruitt says, shaking his head.
“No.”
“Can’t imagine someone coming after me with something like that. Jesus. Shades of Lizzie Borden. And pieces of bloody rope from being strung up.” He points to the shackles and rings bolted into stone that is crusty and black with old blood, and I almost imagine I can smell fear down here, the unimaginable terror of the football player tortured and murdered on Halloween.
“Why didn’t he clean this up?” I ask the first question that comes to mind as I look at a scene that doesn’t appear to have been touched after Wally Jamison was brutally and sadistically murdered down here.
“I guess he took the path of least resistance and just covered everything up with plyboard and old carpet,” Pruitt replies. “That’s why there’s a lot of dirt and fibers everywhere. Appears after the homicide, he didn’t bother washing things down at all. Just heaped old carpet on top and leaned all these boards against the wall.” He points again to the pile of old torn carpet of different colors, and near it, the large sheets of plyboard stacked on the white floor near a closed access door that leads outside the cellar.
“I don’t know why he wouldn’t have washed it down,” I repeat. “That was three months ago. He just left a crime scene, practically left it like a time capsule? Just threw carpet and plyboard over it?”
“One theory is he got off on it. Like people who photograph or film what they do so they can continue getting off on it after the fact. Every time he came down here, he knew what was behind the boards and carpet, what was hidden under them, and got off on it.”
Or someone got off on it, I think. Jack Fielding has never gotten off on gore. For a forensic pathologist, he was actually rather squeamish. Benton will say it was the influence of drugs. Everyone is probably saying that, and maybe it’s true. Fielding was altered, that much I don’t doubt.
“Some of us can help you with this, you know,” Pruitt then says, looking at me through a plastic face shield that clouds up intermittently as he breathes the cold cellar air. His hazel eyes are alert and friendly as they look at me, but he is troubled. How could anybody not be, and I wonder if he senses what I do. I wonder if he has a feeling in his gut that something is wrong with all this. I wonder if he’s asking the question I am right now as I look at the blackened whitewashed wall with the rusting shackles bolted into the stone.
Why would Jack Fielding do something like this?
Extracting semen to sell to bereft families is almost understandable. One can easily blame greed or even a lust for the gratification, the power he must have felt when he was able to give back life where it had been taken. But as I envision the photographs, video recordings, and CT scans I’ve seen of Wally Jamison’s mutilated body, I’m reminded of what went through my thoughts at the time. His murder seemed sexually and emotionally driven, as if the person who swung the weapon at him had feelings for him, certainly had a rage that didn’t quit until Wally was lacerated, sliced, cut, and contused beyond recognition and bled to death. Afterward, his nude body was transported, probably by boat, probably by Fielding’s boat, and dumped in the harbor at the coast guard station, an act that Benton describes as brazen, as a taunt to law enforcement. And that doesn’t sound like Fielding, either. For such a fierce muscle-bound grandmaster, he was rather much a coward.
“Thank you. Let’s see what’s needed,” I say to Pruitt.
“Well, you know the DNA that’s needed. Hundreds of samples already, not just the semen that needs to be reconnected with its donor but everything else being swabbed.”
“I know. It’s a huge job and will go on for quite a while because we don’t know what’s happened in here. Just part of it. What was in the freezer and then whatever else was done in addition to what I’m supposing must have been the homicide of the BC student, Wally Jamison.” As I say his name I envision him, square-jawed with curly black hair and bright blue eyes, and powerfully built. Then what he looked like later. “What time did you get here?”
“John and I flew in early, got here about seven hours ago.”
I don’t ask him where Briggs is now.
“He did the external exam and will go over those details with you when you’re ready,” Pruitt adds.
“And nobody had touched him prior to that.” Fielding’s body was discovered shortly after three a.m. Or that’s what I’ve been told.
“When John and I got here, the body was covered just like he is now. The Glock isn’t here. After the FBI restored the eradicated serial number, the gun was bagged and is now at your labs,” Pruitt tells me what Benton did.
“I didn’t know about it until a little while ago. When I was being driven here.”
“Look. If I’d been here at three a.m. and it was up to me?” He starts to say he would have told me everything that was going on. “But the FBI wanted to keep things contained, since no one’s been sure if he was a lone wolf.” He means if Fielding was. “Because of all the other factors, like Dr. Saltz and the MP and so on. The fear of terrorism.”