Port Mortuary (2010) - By Patricia Cornwell Page 0,3

as if they’re exotic creatures, such as manatees or elephants or prehistoric birds. I never tire of their lumbering drama and thundering noise, and the shadows they cast as they pass over.

Wheels touch down in puffs of smoke so close by I feel the rumble in my hollow organs as I walk across the receiving area with its four enormous bays, high privacy wall, and backup generators. I approach a blue van I’ve never seen before, and Pete Marino makes no move to greet me or open my door, and this bodes nothing one way or another. He doesn’t waste his energy on manners, not that being gracious or particularly nice has ever been a priority of his for as long as I can remember. It’s been more than twenty years since the time when we first met in Richmond, Virginia, at the morgue. Or maybe it was a homicide scene where I first was confronted with him. I really can’t recall.

I climb in and shut the door, stuffing a duffel bag between my boots, my hair still damp from the shower. He thinks I look like hell and is silently judging. I can always tell by his sidelong glances that survey me from head to toe, lingering in certain places that are none of his business. He doesn’t like it when I wear my AFME investigative garb, my khaki cargo pants, black polo shirt, and tactical jacket, and the few times he’s seen me in uniform I think I scared him.

“Where’d you steal the van?” I ask as he backs up.

“A loaner from Civil Air.” His answer at least tells me nothing has happened to Lucy.

The private terminal on the north end of the runway is used by nonmilitary personnel who are authorized to land on the air force base. My niece has flown Marino here, and it crosses my mind they’ve come as a surprise. They showed up unannounced to spare me from flying commercial in the morning, to escort me home at last. Wishful thinking. That can’t be it, and I look for answers in Marino’s rough-featured face, taking in his overall appearance rather much the way I do a patient at first glance. Running shoes, jeans, a fleece-lined Harley-Davidson leather coat he’s had forever, a Yankees baseball cap he wears at his own peril, considering he now lives in the Republic of the Red Sox, and his unfashionable wire-rim glasses.

I can’t tell if his head is shaved smooth of what little gray hair he has left, but he is clean and relatively neat, and he doesn’t have a whisky flush or a bloated beer gut. His eyes aren’t bloodshot. His hands are steady. I don’t smell cigarettes. He’s still on the wagon, more than one. Marino has many wagons he is wise to stay on, a train of them working their way through the unsettled territories of his aboriginal inclinations. Sex, booze, drugs, tobacco, food, profanity, bigotry, slothfulness. I probably should add mendacity. When it suits him, he’s evasive or outright lies.

“I assume Lucy’s with the helicopter…?” I start to say.

“You know how it is around this joint when you’re doing a case, worse than the damn CIA,” he talks over me as we turn onto Purple Heart Drive. “Your house could be on fire and nobody says shit, and I must have called five times. So I made an executive decision, and Lucy and me headed out.”

“It would be helpful if you’d tell me why you’re here.”

“Nobody would interrupt you while you were doing the soldier from Worcester,” he says to my amazement.

PFC Gabriel was from Worcester, Massachusetts, and I can’t fathom why Marino would know what case I had here at Dover. No one should have told him. Everything we do at Port Mortuary is extremely discreet, if not strictly classified. I wonder if the slain soldier’s mother did what she threatened and called the media. I wonder if she told the press that her son’s white female military medical examiner is a racist.

Before I can ask, Marino adds, “Apparently, he’s the first war casualty from Worcester, and the local media’s all over it. We’ve gotten some calls, I guess people getting confused and thinking any dead body with a Massachusetts connection ends up with us.”

“Reporters assumed we’d done the autopsy in Cambridge?”

“Well, the CFC’s a port mortuary, too. Maybe that’s why.”

“One would think the media certainly knows by now that all casualties in theater come straight here to Dover,” I reply. “You’re certain