The Bone Bridge, Chapter 15

Chapter Fifteen
(November 2nd 2009, eight days ago)

“Define ‘exploded’”, I said to Dr. Albert Tomlinson, ME.

“Well, it’s kind of an unscientific term, Ed, but that’s basically what happened to these people. Their hearts just… exploded. Atria, arteries. In 14 cases, the various parts of the heart just suppurated.”

A cadaver still covered by a slightly blood-stained sheet lied between the portly medical examiner and me. It’s a cliché in the movies, I know, about the homicide detective visiting the coroner or ME during a murder investigation but the truth is we’re often called upon to do just this. It’s one thing to dispassionately read an autopsy report, look at toxicology results, free histamine levels and so forth and look at morgue photos but sometimes the only way to get a real sense of what actually happened, if not how, is to see the body itself no matter how gruesome it is. Thankfully, Tomlinson was enough of a professional to avoid the Hollywood ME stereotype by not resting a sandwich on the chest of the corpse. He was, however, relishing a 12” meatball sub on honey wheat that he got from the Subway shop down the street.

“14 out of the 23 who were still in the penthouse?”

“Uh, not exactly. And that’s the strangest thing, too.”

I hadn’t yet read the results of the one file that Tomlinson had just put in my hands. “What do you mean? It actually gets stranger?”

“Oh yeah. In two other cases with the body bombs…” I winced as he used that term. That’s what the NYFD called the poor bastards who jumped out of the Twin Towers on 9/11 and I always hated that phrase. “In the cases of Senator Dumont and Congressman Feingold, there was the same cardiac suppuration that we’d seen with the penthouse victims.”

“Could traumatic deceleration account for that? They were a couple of dozen floors up.”

“Mmm,” Tomlinson hummed with a cynical wince, “it’s possible but not too likely. Even from that height, the internal organs are still pretty heavily shielded by the musculature, the rib cage and so forth. In the most extreme cases of traumatic deceleration, you’d see, at most, a tearing of connective tissue in some of the internal organs. But nothing to compare to this degree of suppuration. And even if a fall from that height could account for the suppuration, then how do we explain the penthouse victims? Let me show you something…” Then Tomlinson pulled off his blood-stained latex gloves and turned his back to me while he briefly washed and dried his hands. Walking to a corner of the lab, he picked up a plastic model of the human heart.

“Now, look at this training tool. You can just remove the various atria and arteries and so forth almost like a puzzle. That’s the closest I can come to describing what my assistants and I had discovered.” To prove his point, he removed a ventricle or something and put it back in its proper place. “I’ll tell you the truth, Ed, it’s cases like this that make me wonder if I should’ve become a vet or dentist instead. Medical forensics is a frighteningly exact science to a lot of criminals and laymen while there’s still a lot we don’t know about the human body.

“But for the life of me, Ed, I cannot give you one good scientific or even logical reason why or how this could happen to a human heart even considering the physically traumatic perimortem circumstances. It’s almost as if… I dunno, as if someone noninvasively reached into their chest cavities and took apart their cardiac tissue by intelligent design. The two that puzzle me are the senator and the congressman. They were in free fall. And don’t even get me started on those clean wounds on several of the bodies.”

Even keeping an open mind, I still had no clue as to how that could’ve happened. “Yeah, and their angle of descent proves that they didn’t just keel over and fall through the window. They actually jumped. They couldn’t have done that if they were already dead.”

“True. Unless they were thrown out.”

“Nah. We’ve reviewed the security tapes from the lobby. Nobody who wasn’t cleared got up to that penthouse. And I can’t believe that members of Congress and captains of industry would start throwing each other out of high-rise windows.”

“You’ve also never think until the night before last that any of them would willingly jump from those windows, leaving their spouses behind in some cases, and that their organs would come undone on the way down.”

Tomlinson had a point. Once again, I felt like the village idiot that had my hat snatched from my head and kept behind me by a jeering crowd of tormenters no matter how many times I whirled around.

OK, suppose we’re talking about an intelligent entity taking apart the senator’s and congressman’s cardiac tissue. Whatever… creature that could accomplish that would have to do so while the victims were in freefall and accelerating at the rate of 66 feet per second. What the fuck could do something like that? What could be that predatory and tenacious? I wasn’t exactly eager to find out.

(November 10th 2009)

By this time I and the growing task force was armed with the autopsy reports of all 53 victims. I say “armed” in a semi-facetious sense. Actually it was like being armed with handguns and rifles with no ammo or weapons from an alien technology. The facts led us nowhere that anyone was willing to go. The Ritz Carlton massacre was getting out of control in the press because neither the mayor’s office nor the Boston City PD could come up with any credible spin or story that would account for everything. Conspiracy theories were being floated on TV, radio, the print media and, Lord help us, blogs. Was it chemical or biological terrorism like nerve gas or anthrax, were they poisoned, was it some new, more virulent strain of Legionnaire’s Disease? Inquiring yet stubbornly uninformed minds wanted to know.

I think I can lay a pretty good claim to be the loneliest detective in America because I was reluctantly working my way down a road that was not only the one less traveled but one overgrown and blocked with foliage, mountains and healthy, human skepticism. Because if I was to come forward and let the other detectives on the task force know what my pet theory was, they’d either put me on the rubber gun squad or on a permanent vacation in a rubber room. I could just imagine it now.

Chief, we got him. Put an APB out on a ghost who has medical knowledge and can fly a couple of hundred miles an hour…

Yet as crazy as it sounded, it was still better than the idiotic theories being floated around the office by the other clowns. Roddy had the stupidest one of all: It was some new super virus that had been introduced into the ventilation duct work of the hotel, which would explain why the Boston Fire Department wouldn’t have found it since they were looking for carbon monoxide and other common contaminants. Yet that brilliant example of ratiocination didn’t explain why we were still alive with our internal organs intact after freely walking around the penthouse or why such a surgically-savvy virus never showed up in the blood work done by the coroner’s office.

Still, the easiest and most convenient explanation that could be floated was that this was an act of terrorism. Considering the social standing of the 50+ victims (almost all of whom were millionaires, including one billionaire), the likelihood of this being a random, tragic accident just didn’t fly, if you’ll pardon the phrase. After all, terrorists attacked our financial and military infrastructure on 9/11 and Flight 93’s crash in a barren field in Pennsylvania was only incidental. They could’ve been headed to the White House or elsewhere in Washington, DC.

But there was no telling how the public would react if the Boston City PD and the mayor’s office announced that terrorism accounted for all the deaths of 53 of our most high profile citizens. In this paranoid post-9/11 nation of ours, I’d heard stories of toddlers getting kicked off airplanes for waving bye bye to the planes still on the tarmac and Sikhs getting detained at the departure gates because the minimum wage-earning organ donors hired by Homeland Security thought they were Muslims.

Yeah, terrorism would go over real well. Yet, this was exactly what we were probably looking at. The only difference between me and the rest of the task force was that I was looking at a theory that was somewhat more unconventional than the chief of detectives would have liked. And after my conversation with the Moss kid’s older sister, I got the closest thing yet to confirmation that what happened at the Boston Ritz Carlton on Halloween night was definitely not explainable by conventional means.

So I wanted to be a fly on the wall when that kid got to meet his sister’s boss, this Oliver Blood character. I ran a BOP or a background check on this bozo and got nowhere. Nothing there, nothing on NCIC, not even shit on him on Google. In a way, this guy, too, was like a ghost. I was interested in knowing if this bird even existed. That’s why at the skateboard park in Braintree I gave the Moss kid a wire to wear with instructions on how to use it and expressly forbade him from telling his sister about it. When this Blood character had his little face-to-face with Adam, I absolutely wanted to be there. I trusted Elle and her mysterious boss about as far as I could throw Langley and hated getting in as deep with her and her agency than I already was. The very fact that I gave her as much confidential information as I did is in itself a testament as to how desperate I was for answers and insight.