Flesh and Blood

“You parked out there?” Marino directs this at Joanna, and she nods, not meeting his eyes.

“What kind of vehicle?”

“A Suburban. A rental. We’re moving things … We were supposed to move things around and needed something big.” She looks past him in a fixed wide-eyed stare.

“You don’t own a car?” Marino asks.

“We traded in both of ours on his new Honda.” Her voice quavers. “The red one out there.”

“The cleanup crew wants to start picking up the spilled groceries. And …” T. J. Hardy glances at Joanna as he chooses his words. “And you know, start tidying things up.”

Marino looks at me. “We’re done, right?”

The body is at the CFC but I don’t mention it. The blood, the gore certainly need to be gone and I’m not going to say that either. I tell Marino that cleanup can get started, and Joanna quietly cries in spasms. Officer Hardy steps back outside. The solid sound of the oak door shutting startles her and her knees almost buckle. She gasps and holds a tissue over her nose and mouth, her eyes bloodshot and smeared with makeup.

“Why don’t you come sit and let’s talk,” Marino says to her, and he introduces himself, adding, “Doctor Scarpetta is the chief medical examiner of Massachusetts and also works for the Pentagon.”

“The Pentagon?” Joanna isn’t impressed and he just scared her.

“It just means I have federal jurisdiction in certain cases.” I dismiss it as nothing.

“What? You’re the fucking FBI.” The look in her eyes changes just like that.

Marino had to brag and now I have to undo it. I explain I’m an Air Force special reservist affiliated with the Armed Forces Medical Examiners. She wants to know what that means. I tell her I assist the federal government with medical intelligence and help out with military matters but I also work for the state and my office is here in Cambridge. The more detail I give the more she glazes over. Wiping her eyes. Not listening. She doesn’t care about my pedigree. She’s not threatened by it and that’s what I want.

“Point being you couldn’t be in better hands,” Marino adds. “She may have a few questions about medications, about any general health details she should know about your husband.”

He’s says it as if I’m their family doctor and it’s a tried-and-true manipulation, a familiar one I wish wasn’t needed. Nari’s prescription drugs and health history have nothing to do with what killed him. A gun did. But Marino wants me present, and if Joanna thinks what he’s saying is a ploy she makes no indication. Instead she’s suddenly deflated as if there’s no point in fighting what can’t be changed. There’s no protest or argument that will make it untrue.

“Where is he? Where’s Jamal?” Her tone is dead. “Why is that big black box set up in front of the house? I don’t understand. Was that where they put him? They wouldn’t let me look inside it. Is he in there? Where is he?”

“He’s been taken to my office for examination.” I repeat what I’ve already told her. “The black enclosure was to ensure privacy and respect. Come sit down.” I touch her elbow and lead her to the couch, and she sits stiffly on the edge of it, wiping her eyes.

“Who did this? Who would do this?” Her voice shakes and catches.

“Well that’s what this is all about, Joanna. We gotta find that out.” Marino sets a chair directly across from her and sits down. “I’m real sorry. I know how hard this is but I’ve got a lot of questions I need you to answer if you’re going to help us figure out what happened to Jamal, okay?”

She nods. I sit down off to the side.

“Starting with what time you left here this morning, where you were headed and why.” Marino has his notepad out.

“I already told the other one that. He said Jamal was shot while he was getting groceries out of the car. That someone shot him.” She looks at me. “But you said you don’t know if he was shot.”

“He needs to be examined so we can be sure of exactly what happened.” I avoid using the word autopsy.

Her eyes race around the living room and then she stares at the three guitars. “Who did that?” Her voice goes up a notch and is louder as she stares accusingly at us. “Jamal packed them in their cases. He’s so careful with his guitars. Who put them back on their stands?”

“That’s interesting,” Marino says. “There’s two cases on the bed. Where’s the third one?”

“You had no right! Touching his things, you had no right!”

“We didn’t touch his guitars,” Marino says and I think of Machado.

But he wouldn’t do that. I look across the room at the guitars, different shapes, black carbon fiber, one a matte finish, two shiny and shimmering with mother-of-pearl inlays. Upright on stands, a rubber gooseneck clamped over the strings. Facing out. Perfectly, precisely arranged, and I get out of my chair. I walk over to them and detect the vague chlorine smell of bleach, what I smelled in the bathroom. Someone was inside this apartment here who shouldn’t have been, and then I check the kitchen again.

The paper towels in the trash have no odor at all. Bleach destroys DNA. Something else was used to wipe out the drawers. Two different types of evidence, two different means of eradicating it. Possibly two different people. I sit back down. I give Marino a look that he understands. Jamal Nari’s killer may have been inside this apartment at some point, and I think of Machado again at the same instant Marino asks Joanna about him.

“I know you two talked.” He keeps the annoyance out of his voice and there’s no sign of it on his face.

But I know what he feels. Machado shouldn’t have offered details to her. He shouldn’t have said her husband was shot. If she’d said it first it would have been significant.

“You told Detective Machado you were in Tilton, New Hampshire. At the Tanger Outlets?” Marino asks her.

“He was shot in broad daylight by his car?” She’s trembling hard and maybe this time for a different reason. “Did anyone see who did it or try to help?”

When he doesn’t answer as he flips through pages in his notepad, she gets more agitated and anger glints.

“Did anyone try to get an ambulance? Didn’t anyone try to help him?” She’s asking me this.

“It was a fatal injury.” I select my words carefully.

“You mean there was nothing that could have been done. Nothing at all?”

“Your husband died very quickly.”

“I’m hoping you might know something that will help us,” Marino says.

She glares at him. “I have no idea who did this.”

“Detective Machado called your cell when you were on your way to New Hampshire.” Marino baits the trap.

“I was already there at the luggage store.”

“Was it Tanger or Merrimack?” Marino frowns, flipping pages. He looks confused. “You know the one in Tanger or the bigger outlet mall about an hour from here?”

“The bigger one. I was returning a bag with a broken zipper and he called. I asked him how he got my number and I thought maybe it was the police harassing us again.”

“As I remember it the FBI was investigating your husband not the police. In light of your bad experience it’s real important you make that distinction, Joanna.” Marino is leaning forward, his big gloved hands on his big knees. “We’re not the FBI. We’re not the ones who put you through all that.”

“It’s never been the same.” She shreds the tissue in her lap. “Is that why? Because of that someone targeted Jamal? We got a lot of hateful things from people. On the Internet. Mail. Stuff left by our cars at school and here.”

“Is that what you think?” Marino is baiting her again.

He knows what she offered to Machado when she first got the news. About the student she was helping. About a robbery gone bad.

“I don’t know what to think!” Tears flood her eyes and spill down her cheeks, streaking her makeup, the flesh around her eyes a mascara smear.

Marino slowly gets up from his chair. He walks to the kitchen, looks at the bags of groceries. He peers through the open bedroom doorway, looks at the luggage, the stacks of taped-up Bankers Boxes. His black gloved thumbs type on his BlackBerry.