Douglas Burke, it enters my mind, the tall brunette far too feminine and pretty for the names she goes by, Doug or Dougie, and it’s not uncommon for her to vanish with Benton, to be unaccounted for. It could be any hour of the day or night or on a weekend or a holiday, and often I’m told nothing, and I know when not to ask, but now isn’t one of those times.
When we have a moment alone I will demand that Benton tell me exactly what is going on, because I can tell by the hard set of his jaw and tension in his sharp-featured face that something is, and it occurs to me that he hasn’t spoken to Marino or looked at him. Benton is completely avoiding Marino, as are Special Agent Burke and Machado and the woman I’ve never met. Only Anne and Luke are acting as if all is normal, oblivious to the real reason the FBI and police are here, which isn’t because they want to watch a CT scan or an autopsy.
“How’s everybody doing?” Marino asks, and only Anne replies that she’s doing fine, and I can tell he senses something is off.
“I was just explaining that CT is pretty much the opposite of MR in some regards, blood showing up bright on CT, while it’s dark on MR,” Anne explains to Marino and me.
No one responds, and the tension gets thicker.
“But not so with other fluids—specifically, water—because water isn’t dense,” Anne explains to Machado and Burke, and to the woman I don’t know, whom I suspect is FBI.
I hold Benton’s gaze, waiting.
“These areas here and here?” Anne indicates the sinuses, the lungs, the stomach displayed in 3-D on different computer screens. “If they were showing up really dark, pretty much black, it could indicate the presence of water, which would be typical in a drowning. CT is really great in drowning cases. Sometimes when you open up the body during autopsy, you lose the fluid before you can see it, especially if there’s water in the stomach. But we scan first and don’t miss anything.”
“We wouldn’t expect her to have water in her lungs, her stomach, not anywhere,” I say to Anne, but my eyes are on Benton. “She’s moderately mummified. She hardly has a drop of fluid in her entire body, barely enough to blot a card for DNA, and if she’s a drowning, she didn’t drown recently.”
My mind keeps going back to the way Marino acted earlier today, as if the dead woman was personally offensive to him. His upset over the vintage buttons on her jacket was bizarre, and I have an incredible premonition, an awful one.
“She’d been dead quite a while by the time she was weighted down and dropped into the bay,” I’m saying, “and I’m wondering who called this gathering?”
“We think we got an ID,” Sil Machado says.
twenty
HE TURNS TO BENTON AND SPECIAL AGENT BURKE AND the woman I don’t know, as if it is up to them to continue, and I know what that means.
The Portuguese Man of War, as Marino calls Sil Machado, is a young hotshot, built like a bull, with dark hair and eyes and preppy taste in clothes, and he’s not a devotee of the FBI and doesn’t turn over a case to them without question and in some instances without resistance. If he’s deferring to them even as we stand here, then the Feds already have taken over the investigation, and there has to be a justifiable cause for it.
“How come nobody let me know?” Marino glares at Luke. “An ID based on what?” His tone is accusatory. “How’s that possible? It’s not like we could have DNA this fast, and forget a fingerprint match. That can’t happen without rehydrating her fingerpads, meaning we’re probably going to have to remove them first, which was what I planned to do—”
“Tell you what, Pete,” Machado interrupts him. “Why don’t you come with me, and we’ll let them talk while we go over a few things?”
“What?” Marino instantly is paranoid.
“We’ll go over everything.”
“You don’t want them talking in front of me?” Marino’s voice gets loud. “What the fuck!”
“Come on, buddy.” Machado winks at him.
“This is bullshit!”
“Come on, Pete. Don’t be like that.” Machado gets close to him, puts a hand on his arm, and Marino tries to shake him off, and Machado grips him harder. “Let’s go take a load off, and I’ll explain.” He escorts Marino out into the corridor. “I know you