Port Mortuary Read Free Page A

whatever that building is, the one with the big green metal roof.”
    Norton’s Woods is the home of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a wooded estate with a stunning building of timber and glass that is rented out for special functions. It is several houses down from the one Benton and I moved into last spring so I could be near the CFC and he could enjoy the close proximity of Harvard, where he is on the faculty of the medical school’s Department of Psychiatry.
    “In other words, eyes and ears,” Marino goes on. “A hell of a time and a place to whack somebody.”
    “I thought you said he was a heart attack. Except if he’s that young, you probably mean a cardiac arrhythmia.”
    “Yeah, that was the assumption. A couple of witnesses saw him suddenly grab his chest and collapse. He was DOA at the scene—supposedly. Was transported directly to our office and spent the night in the cooler.”
    “What do you mean
‘supposedly’
?”
    “Early this morning Fielding went into the fridge and noticed blood drips on the floor and a lot of blood in the tray, so he goes and gets Anne and Ollie. The dead guy’s got blood coming out of his nose and mouth that wasn’t there the afternoon before, when he was pronounced. No blood at the scene, not one drop, and now he’s bleeding, and it’s not purge fluid, obviously, because he sure as hell isn’t decomposing. The sheet he’s covered with is bloody, and there’s about a liter of blood in the body pouch, and that’s fucked up. I’ve never seen a dead person start bleeding like that. So I said we got a fucking problem and everybody keep your mouth shut.”
    “What did Jack say? What did he do?”
    “You’re kidding, right? Some deputy you got. Don’t get me started.”
    “Do we have an identification, and why Norton’s Woods? Does he live nearby? Is he a student at Harvard, maybe at the Divinity School?” It’s right around the corner from Norton’s Woods. “I doubt he was attending whatever this event was. Not if he had his dog with him.” I sound much calmer than I feel as we have this conversation in the parking lot of the Eagle’s Rest inn.
    “We don’t have many details yet, but it appears it was a wedding,” Marino says.
    “On Super Bowl Sunday? Who plans a wedding on the same day as the Super Bowl?”
    “Maybe if you don’t want anybody to show up. Maybe if you’re not American or are un-American. Hell if I know, but I don’t think the dead guy was a wedding guest, and not just because of the dog. He had a Glock nine-mil under his jacket. No ID and was listening to a portable satellite radio, so you probably can guess where I’m going with this.”
    “I probably can’t.”
    “Lucy will tell you more about the satellite-radio part of it, but it appears he was doing surveillance, spying, and maybe whoever he was fucking with decided to return the favor. Bottom line, I’m thinking somebody did something to him, causing an injury that was somehow missed by the EMTs, and the removal service didn’t notice anything, either. So he’s zipped up in the pouch and starts bleeding during transport. Well, that wouldn’t happen unless he had a blood pressure, meaning he was still alive when he was delivered to the morgue and shut inside our damn cooler. Forty-something degrees in there and he would have died from exposure by this morning. Assuming he didn’t bleed to death first.”
    “If he has an injury that would cause him to bleed externally,” I reply, “why didn’t he bleed at the scene?”
    “You tell me.”
    “How long did they work on him?”
    “Fifteen, twenty minutes.”
    “Possible during resuscitation efforts a blood vessel was somehow punctured?” I ask. “Antemortem and postmortem injuries, if severe enough, can cause significant bleeding. For example, maybe during CPR a rib was fractured and caused a puncture wound or severed an artery? Any reason a chest tube might have been placed presumptively and that caused