medical examiner was a misogynistic bigoted alcoholic who died suddenly and left a disastrous legacy. No seasoned board-certified forensic pathologist with a decent reputation wanted to take his place. So a bright idea occurred to the men in charge. What about a woman?
Women are good at cleaning up messes. Why not find a female forensic expert? It doesn’t matter if she’s young and missing the requisite experience to head a statewide system. As long as she’s a qualified expert in court and minds her manners she can grow into the position. How about an overeducated detail-addicted work-obsessed perfectionistic Italian woman who grew up dirt poor, has everything to prove, is turbo-driven and divorced with no kids?
Well no kids sort of until the unexpected happened. My only sister’s only offspring Lucy Farinelli was the baby on my doorstep. Except this baby was ten years old, knew more about computers and all things mechanical than I did or ever would, and she was a tabula rasa when it came to appropriate behavior. To say Lucy was difficult is like saying that lightning is hazardous. It’s a statement of fact that will always be a given.
My niece was and is a challenge. Immutably and incurably. But as a child she was impossible and uncivilized. She was a genius aborigine, angry, beautiful, fiery, fearless, remorseless and untouchable, overly sensitive and insatiable. Nothing I might have done for her could have been enough. But I tried. I tried relentlessly against all odds. I’ve always feared I’d be a lousy mother. I have no reason to be a good one.
I thought a stuffed bear might make a neglected little girl feel better and possibly loved, and as I watch Mister Pickle on the bed of Lucy’s former dorm room in a surveillance video I didn’t know existed until one minute ago, a low voltage shock settles into a generalized calm. I go flatline. I focus. I think clearly, objectively, scientifically. I must. The video playing on my phone is authentic. It’s crucial I accept that. The footage wasn’t Photoshopped or manufactured. I know damn well what I’m seeing.
The FBI Academy. Washington Dormitory. Room 411.
I try to pinpoint precisely when Lucy was there as an intern first and later a new agent. Before she got run off the job. Basically fired by the FBI. Then ATF. Then became a mercenary special operator disappearing on missions I don’t want to know about before starting her own forensic computer company in New York City. Until she got run out of there too.
Then has become now, a Friday morning in the middle of August. Lucy is a thirty-five-year-old extremely rich technical entrepreneur who generously shares her talents with me, with my headquarters the Cambridge Forensic Center (CFC), and as I watch the surveillance video I’m in two places. Back in time and here in the present. They’re connected. A continuum.
Everything I’ve done and been has pushed forward slowly and unstoppably like a landmass, propelling me into this marble foyer spattered with putrid blood. What’s gone before has brought me exactly where I am, limping and in pain with a badly injured leg and a decomposing dead body near me on the floor. My past. But most importantly Lucy’s past, and I envision a galaxy of bright swirling shapes and secrets in a vast inky void. Darkness, scandals, deceptions, betrayals, fortunes won and lost and won again, bad shootings, good ones and near-misses.
Our lives together started with hopes and dreams and promise, and incrementally got worse and better and finally not so bad and then pretty good until it all went to hell again this past June when I almost died. I thought the horror story was over forever and no longer foremost on anybody’s mind. I couldn’t have been more mistaken. It’s as if I outran a speeding train only to be hit by it coming the other way around a bend in the tracks.
“Has anybody asked the Doc?” The voice belongs to Cambridge Police Officer Hyde. “I mean marijuana could do that, right? You smoke a lot of weed and get high and have some bullshit brainstorm like how about I change a lightbulb while I’m naked? That sounds smart. Right? Ha! Real damn smart, right? And you fall off the ladder in the middle of the night when no one’s around and crack your head open.”
Officer Hyde’s first name is Park, a terrible thing to do to a child and he gets called every insulting nickname imaginable and returns the favor. To make matters worse Officer Park Hyde is pudgy and short with freckles and kinky carrot-red hair like a bad parody of Raggedy Andy. He’s not in my line of sight at the moment. But I have excellent hearing, almost bionic like my sense of smell (or that’s the joke).
I imagine odors and sounds as colors in a spectrum or instruments in an orchestra. I’m good at singling them out. Cologne for example. Some cops wear a lot of it and Hyde’s masculine musky fragrance is as loud as his voice. I can hear him in the next room talking about me, asking what I’m doing and if I’m aware that the dead woman was into drugs, was probably a psych case, a whacko, a frequent flying loony tune. The cops are wandering around bantering as if I’m not here, and Hyde leads the charge with his boisterous clunky snipes and asides. He doesn’t hold back, especially when it comes to me.
What’s Doc Mort found? How is Chief Zombie’s leg after you know …? (whisper, whisper) What time is Count Kay returning to her coffin? Shit. I guess that’s not a good thing to say considering what went down two months ago in Florida. I mean do we know for a fact what really happened at the bottom of the sea? We sure it wasn’t a shark that got her. Or maybe she speared herself accidentally? She’s okay now, right? I mean that really had to fuck her up. She can’t hear me, right?
His words and not-so-quiet whispers are around me like shards of glass that glint and cut. Fragments of thoughts. Ignorant banal ones. Hyde is the master of dumb nicknames and comes up with dreadful puns, and I remember what he said as recently as last month when a group of us met at the Cambridge watering hole Paddy’s to toast Pete Marino’s birthday. Hyde insisted on buying me a round, on treating me to a stiff drink, maybe a Bloody Mary or a Sudden Death or a Spontaneous Combustion.
To this day I’m not sure what the latter is but he claims it includes corn whiskey and is served flaming. It might not be lethal but will make you wish it were he must have said five times. He dabbles in comedy, occasionally does stand-up in local clubs. He thinks he’s quite entertaining. He’s not.
“Is Doctor Death still here?”
“I’m in the foyer.” I drop my purple nitrile exam gloves into a red biohazard bag, my Tyvek-covered boots making slippery sounds as I move around the bloody marble floor, staring at the display on my phone.
“Sorry, Doctor Scarpetta. Didn’t know you could hear me.”
“I can.”
“Oh. I guess you heard everything I was just saying.”
“I did.”
“Sorry. How’s your leg?”
“Still attached.”
“Can I get you anything?”
“No thanks.”
“We’re making a Dunkin’ Donuts run.” Hyde’s voice sounds from the dining room, and I’m vaguely aware of him and other cops walking, opening cabinets and drawers.
Marino’s not with them now. I no longer hear him and don’t know where he is inside the house and that’s typical. He does his own thing and he’s competitive. If there’s anything to find he’ll be the one who does, and I should be looking around too. But not now. My priority this moment is the image of four-eleven, what we used to call Lucy’s FBI dorm room in Quantico, Virginia.
So far the recording is devoid of people, narration or even captions as it plays on second by second, offering nothing but the static image of Lucy’s empty stark former quarters. I pay attention to the subtle background sounds, turning up the volume, listening though my wireless earpiece.
A helicopter. A car. Gunshots on distant firing ranges.
Footsteps