Page 5 of Identity Unknown
“That’s twice now in the past few minutes, and it definitely didn’t feel like a wrong number,” I say to Fabian. “It felt like someone playing creepy games.”
“I’ve had a couple of the same sort of calls this morning,someone calling my direct number, waiting a few seconds, then disconnecting. The caller ID wasout of area.”
“The number for investigations is public,” I point out. “This one isn’t.”
“I keep telling you we need to update the phone down here. It must go back to the days of the Beatles.”
“Not quite, but it needs replacing like so many things that aren’t in the budget and have to be approved.” I spray my case notes with Lysol before unclamping them from the clipboard. “If the calls continue, we’ll get the police involved.”
“Where are you headed?” Fabian sutures the Y-incision with long sweeps of the needle and twine.
“Marino and I are flying to the western part of the state, and communication will be a challenge.” I wash my hands with disinfectant soap. “While we’re gone I need you to start tracking down Luna Briley’s medical information. We can expect the parents to interfere at every opportunity, and all of us need to be very careful. The Brileys aren’t to be trifled with.”
“I hope they rot in jail.” Fabian returns the fractured cranium to the top of the skull.
He covers it with the scalp, the short red hair shaved in spots where I found contusions several days old. I can hear the mother sobbing about her accident-prone daughter.
Always knocking her head on something or falling down.Piper Briley made sure I knew.
For someone so slow? She had to be watched every minute.That’s what the father told me, as if the child was impossible.
“I hope they get treated the same way they treated her,” Fabian is saying.
“Remember, we’re not supposed to take sides.”
“You take sides all the time and just pretend you don’t.”
“Get better at pretending.” I pat his shoulder as I walk by.
Outside the autopsy suite, the long white tile corridor is like the river Styx, the dead ferried along it, day in and out. Walls smudged with dried blood are scuffed and scraped from run-ins with gurneys. Fluorescent lights flicker in the water-stained ceiling, the stench of death pervasive like a painful memory.
The bug zapper electrocutes flies with an unpleasant hiss as I walk past the dark windows of the anthropology lab. I’m headed toward the fire exit, preferring to take the stairs when I can after long hours of standing and sitting. Emotions bubble up from the deep, and I can’t imagine Sal not in my life anymore. He’s been in it so long, practically my entire career.
The summer we connected I was one of a few female forensic pathologists in the United States. Having a law degree made me even more of an anomaly at the age of thirty. I was naïve with much to prove when I was appointed the first woman chief medical examiner of Virginia, not realizing that my being picked for the job had little to do with training or ability.
Hiring me was a political stunt to show the progressiveness of the administration. It also was assumed that a woman would be easy to manipulate, the daughter of Italian immigrants even better. I was sure relocating to Richmond had been a terrible mistake. On leave without pay, I was making plans to move back to Miami when the University of Rome’s medical school invited me to lecture for the summer.
A visiting professor of forensic medicine had canceled at the last minute, and I’d been recommended as a replacement. My sister, Dorothy, and I grew up speaking Italian, and I didn’t hesitate to accept the offer. Teaching while living the aesthetic life in faculty housing seemed like just the remedy for my failures and disappointments. But as my father used to say,Il destino ha la sua idea.Fate has its own idea.
I’d been in Rome but a few days when Sal and I literally collided in a bistro near the Campo de’ Fiori. Replacing our glasses of spilled Chianti, he told me he was an astrophysics professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. On sabbatical in Rome for a year, he was writing a book while staying in the home where he grew up.A quaint little place but old,as he described it.
His parents spent summers in the South of France, and we had the apartment to ourselves. To me it was a palace overlooking the Fontana del Moro in the Piazza Navona. We cooked lavish meals, sampling regional dishes and wines, sleeping little. Pondering our place in the cosmos, we lived out a fairy-tale romance that wasn’t meant to last.
Sal was a genius but more than that he was a good person, one of the best. He didn’t deserve to come to such a hideous end. I hope to God he didn’t suffer. But I know he did if he was abducted last night and hasn’t been dead long. What Lucy described suggests he was kept alive somewhere for many hours. I hate to think what else was done to him. I’m sickened and deeply saddened.
I hope my eyes aren’t red as I push through the fire door, exiting the stairwell on the third floor. Following the hallway, Inod at staff I encounter. Some are on their way out of the building, others in the breakroom for lunch. The aroma of warming food makes my stomach growl. I can hear the microwave oven beeping, the news playing loudly through the open doorway.
I pause to listen, hoping word about Sal hasn’t hit the media. Celebrity TV journalist Dana Diletti is broadcasting live from Mount Vernon, former home of George Washington, our nation’s first president.
“… Today begins Historic Garden Week in Virginia, and bigger crowds than usual are expected on tours of splendid estates around the Commonwealth,” she’s saying in her sultry voice. “And wow are the cherry blossoms ever gorgeous, folks. But if you think this is something, just wait until tomorrow when I take you to Berkeley Plantation on the James River for a private visit to the formal gardens…”
Walking on, I’m assured that the media knows nothing about Sal’s death yet. Otherwise, Dana Diletti would be in her news helicopter, trying to reach the scene before I do like always. I can imagine her whipping the public into a frenzy about UAPs and the entities inside them. She’ll make a big thing about Sal’s otherworldly interests, his nickname in the media the “ET Whisperer.”
A member of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, he’s an icon tobelievers, as he calls those who accept that we aren’t the only life in the universe. Last week Sal and I were at the Pentagon together for a meeting with other experts focused on potential threats to the planet. We discussed how best to inform the public when contact is confirmed with nonhuman intelligence.
He presented a PowerPoint on ‘Oumuamua, the submarine-shaped interstellar object that visited our solar system in 2017.Reflective like metal with a reddish hue, it tumbled past Earth at speeds exceeding two hundred thousand miles an hour at times, not acting like a typical asteroid or comet. Sal proposed that it was an extraterrestrial spacecraft. He made international news for repeatedly attempting to contact it.
The third-floor hallway terminates at my corner office, and I open the door, turning on the light, the window shades drawn inside. I didn’t open them when I arrived at dawn and changed into my scrubs, heading downstairs to get an early start on Luna Briley. I recognize the familiar scent of Lysol that my secretary, Shannon Park, likes to spray liberally.