The dead man had been a serious smoker, the sort who chain-smoked five, perhaps six packs a day; the sort unfazed by taxes on Camels. This guy’d never waiver, never be deterred from his smoke. Helspenny was the sort of addict who lived in a perpetual fog of cigarette smoke and carbon monoxide. And in the end, he traded his breath for the addiction.

Jessica, her auburn hair tied back beneath the surgical cap, her emerald eyes shinning, mentally stowed away the fact that Mr. Helspenny would’ve been dead inside a year, whatever else may’ve happened to him outside her autopsy room.

What made the case of most curious interest was the geography of the murder.

Someone had murdered an ex-marine inside Arlington National Cemetery. Once General Robert E. Lee’s family homestead, confiscated by the US government as ‘payback’ and now many times over a consecrated cemetery where war heroes slumbered, and if urban legend could be believed, wandered in and around the rows upon rows of the dead.

The man’s liver was in less peril but not by much. He’d been a heavy drinker as well. The organs never lie, Jessica thought.

In fact, the condition of the organs at death stood a testament to a man’s life and often his character as well. Often the sum of the injuries a man did himself outweighed the stab wound that killed him.

The diseased organs here certainly wrote this fellow’s epitaph. John ‘Jake’ Helspenny had come out of the Marines a broken man, missing far more than his left leg, right hand, and a piece of his skull and brain from what his wife termed ‘the incident’ in
Iraq.

“All that Jake’d gone through there, all the tooth and nail struggle, the fighting back he did, all the rehab, years and years of it, only to be murdered by that sonofabitch Dooley. Dooley did it sure as I’m standing here.”

“Dooley, ma’am?” asked Kyle Jensen, an Arlington, Virginia detective who’d brought the case to the FBI Medical Examiner, Dr. Coran.

“Yes, his so-called best friend in the service. Dooley.”

Jessica had asked Detective Jensen, a thin, wiry man whose features resembled those of a young George Carlin, why he thought this case involved the FBI, and Jensen, had dryly replied, “The guy’s a marine…was a marine…decorated for bravery in Iraq when the smoke cleared. Hell…I figure the government owes him something.”

“Owes him an autopsy?” she’d asked.

“Something.”

The wife’s lawyer then spoke up, a pushy, stubby little man named Roth. “Look here, Dr. Coran, if this is not given top priority by you people, then you can expect to hear about the inequities of it all on the Today Show with Katie and Matt.”

Jensen put up a hand to Roth, trying to calm him. “No need for that, Mr. Roth.”

Jessica didn’t respond well to threats, and her features must have conveyed as much to Jensen. “There are rules…protocol,” began Jessica, hands on ample hips now.

“Rules?” asked the wife.

“We don’t autopsy a body unless a federal law has been violated.”

“My husband was murdered!”

“Murder is not a federal crime. It’s a state crime, and there are jurisdictional conformities we all adhere to, and Detective
Jensen knows this as well as—”

“But this is an unusual case,” Jensen jumped in, defending his action.

Jessica raised an index finger to Jensen, asking, “Was the body transported across state lines?”

“Ahhh…no, the whole of it happened here in Virginia. But—” began
Roth.

“Then tell me, detective, how is it related to the FBI?”

“He was killed, according to his wife, in the big cemetery, Dr. Coran,” said Detective Jensen.

“Arlington?” This had been the first mention of Arlington.

“Correct.”

“Arlington National Cemetery,” parroted the lawyer, Roth.

“So you think because it occurred on—”

“In a National Park, yes, it ought to be handled by the government’s top police agency.”

“The FBI,” said Roth.

“Perhaps you oughta shoot for the CIA then,” she sharply returned to the lawyer. “But as for jurisdiction, Jensen, you should know this—it actually belongs then to the National Park Rangers Service. Since 9/11 they take their jurisdictional rules extremely seriously.”

“Agreed…to say the least, but we also both know that the Park
Service doesn’t do autopsies.”

“Right…they generally farm them out—to Veterinarians.”

“Very funny but not this old war dog.”

“Look, Jensen, even if I wanted to start cutting on Mr. Helspenny here, I couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t or won’t?” pressed Roth.

The wife’s features had pinched in a mask of anger toward Jessica. “You government types…all alike. Took us forever to get the VA to deal with Jake’s depression, his panic attacks, the living pain in his stump, all of it.” Roth tried to calm his client. “Took us even longer to get his pension up and running, and they give it out like it was some kinda g’damn fund he had no right to.”

Jessica held up both hands as if under attack. “Please, let me put this as simply as I can: Without authorization from the National Park Service people and a go-ahead from my superiors, here at Quantico, there is no going forth with an autopsy. End of discussion.”

“You need authorization from the Park Service?” asked Jensen, surprised.

“Technically speaking, yes.”

“Rules is rules, huh?”

“They may seem a bit absurd but there’s this little thing that even you and Mr. Roth no doubt have run into before called procedure…protocol?”

“I’ll get your go-ahead,” said Attorney Roth. “I happen to know your superior.”

“You do that, Esquire,” Jessica had said to Roth, “and we’ve got a ballgame, despite the fog of jurisdiction and the question of precisely who has it over this particular unfortunate soul…ahhh…body.”

“Damn it, hasn’t anyone every been murdered in a National Park before?” asked Mrs. Hilspenny.

“Of course…many times over, all across the nation,” she replied.

“Particularly missing young women and girls.”

“But never in Arlington…ever,” replied Jensen. “I looked it up on Google.”

“Then it must be true,” said Jessica.

“Except for the thousands killed during the Civil War,” replied Jensen. “I belong to a Confederate reenactment group. Relieves tension.”

“Ahhh yes, play soldier without any real consequences. No one hurt. All the dead on the field get up afterwards, sorta climb out of their graves, heh?”

“It’s great fun. You should join me some weekend.”

She frowned at the obvious pass. “Still, despite our political leanings, we can’t count dead Civil War soldiers as murder victims any more than we can soldiers killed in Iraq today, although the tactics of the enemy are certainly those of cowardly murderers.”

***

It’d been the next day when Roth and Mrs. Helspenny returned with a federal court order signed by her boss to autopsy and determine the cause of death of one John ‘Jake’ Helspenny, former decorated marine.

Jessica was now removing Helspenny’s brain from its cradle, preparing to weigh it in, her eyes already telling her that it was riddled with lesions and not looking any better than any other organ in the ex-marine’s body, when a strange, near imperceptible yet filmy fog rose off the brain as if hitting the bright incandescent light had created a vapor of the brain fluid.

Jessica had never seen such a response in all her years, but she’d heard of it occurring—rarely but it’d been spoken of in her mentor’s book. Dr. Asa Holecraft had called it phenomena of undetermined origin, and try as he might to explain it away in any understandable, verifiable, logical or rational terms, he could not. In fact, he’d summed it up as illogical and out of the ordinary. Long dead now, Asa had seen it only twice in a career as a medical examiner that’d spanned 1948-1984.

No one else in the room to verify that she’d even seen what she saw.

Jessica had sent her assistant, Jenni, out the door when the new young intern had begun choking, coughing, and finally pleading she needed to take a moment to go out and Jessica had assented, and so had, for the first time, found herself alone with Helspenny’s corpse.

She looked up at the camera and wondered if the ghostly bit of fog that’d burned off in a blink had been caught on tape. Then she again wondered if it had even been there or if it was a trick of the eye.

She clicked on the intercom connecting the autopsy room with a waiting ante room wherein Roth and Mrs. Helspenny sat awaiting results.

“I’m finding absolutely no stab wounds to the body. Who is this Dooley person you suspect of killing your husband, Mrs. Helspenny?”

No answer.

“Mrs. Helspenny?”

“Look closer. Dooley used an ice pick to the base of the brain.”

It was Roth speaking for the little, frail woman. Jessica heard her whimpering in the background.

“Why’s Jensen not here for the results with you two?” asked Jessica, curious, also wondering why Mrs. Helspenny hadn’t answered her question about this Dooley character.

“Jensen’s indisposed,” said Roth.

“Indisposed?” came Jessica’s reaction.

“According to his people, he didn’t come in to work this morning. Blue flu was mentioned.”

“I see.”

Nothing more was volunteered either about Jensen or the mysterious Dooley. Jessica decided it could wait. She didn’t care for the sound of Roth’s grating voice face- to-face, but amplified over the intercom, it proved even worse. She determined the less said, the better, at least ‘til after Jake’s body gave up everything.

Jessica’s young intern, Jenni Lee Fulcrum, returned, entering wiping her nose and covering up anew.

“Rough night, Jenni?”

“Bad break up.”

“No? You and Don?”

“Don Porter is an ass. I could just kill him.”

“Now where’s that coming from? Just yesterday, you two were in love, the deepest most—”

“Please! I don’t wanna hear it!”

Jessica saw the pure, unadulterated hatred in Jenni’s eyes just above her surgical mask. She realized Jenni meant it, and had Don Porter been standing alongside Jenni with that scalpel in her hand…anything might happen. Love is murder, Jessica thought.

“Perhaps you ought to take the day off, Jen…get some perspective on things. You seem in a fog.”

“A fog of hatred, I know. Been unable to see my way out.”

A horrid scream came over the intercom that’d been left open. Someone’s scream left no room for doubt. Jessica, followed by Jenni, rushed from the autopsy room to the waiting room.

Roth lay on the floor, the institutional gray and green patterned carpet sucking up blood coming from the back of his skull. Standing over him, a huge ice pick in her hand, was Mrs. Helspenny.

“Dooley did it…Dooley! I tol’ ya…tol’ ya all again and again! Tol’ this fool he’d strike again if…if nobody’d stop him!”

“Stop Dooley?” Jessica asked.

Helspenny cried out, “Now look! It’s happened!”

Kathrine Moira Helspenny dropped the ice pick and went to her knees. “Bastard Dooley killed my Jake! Killed him at the grave.”

Jessica grabbed up the ice pick between two fingers as carefully as she might to maintain the fingerprint evidence. Jenni whipped out a plastic bag from her pocket, and in went the pick.

“Killed Jake at his grave,” the distressed woman muttered.

“What grave?” asked Jessica as calmly as she could muster under the circumstances, realizing there was no helping Roth. “Whose grave?”

“Dooley’s damn it! Dooley’s grave!”

“Dooley’s a dead soldier?”

“He’s buried in Arlington, isn’t he!”

“Who was Dooley, Katherine? Who was he to Jake and you?”

“He was father to my child…died in Iraq in the incident.”

“In the incident? The same incident that maimed Jake?”

“He blames Jake to this day. Even in death, he blames Jake. And when Jake came home, took me for his wife…he…he tried to take Dooley’s place, but he never could…no matter how he tried. Dooley kept coming in the fog, whispered to me from the fog.”

“Haunted you?” asked Jenni.

“Why was Jake at Dooley’s gravesite?” Jessica asked.

“He wasn’t. I mean, he came for me. Dooley kept calling for me to visit. Jake knew where I’d be.”

“Jake came to find you in the cemetery?”

“I was kneeling over the grave again when…when Dooley came on the fog.”

“Came on the fog?”

“Like part of it…like made of it.”

“Then Dooley took you over?” asked Jessica.

She nodded, “And he got his wish, did what was in his dead heart.”

“Killed Jake.”

“With the ice pick.”

“The same ice pick as this one?” Jessica pointed to the bloody pick on the carpet.

“Dooley put it in my head and my hand to do it.”

“You…you loved Dooley very much, didn’t you?” asked Jenni, trembling on hearing this chilling news. The scalpel in her hand shivered with her.

“There was a great fog over Arlington when it happened,” said Katherine Helspenny.

Jessica recalled the weather report the day Jake Helspenny was killed. There had been so much fog over the area that she’d had trouble driving in from her and Richard’s country home.

“You ever really, truly take the time to stop and watch fog…watch it move?” Katherine was asking Jenni like two girls sharing patterns.

“Yeah, I have,” replied Jenni.

“There’s a strange life in it like…like the life of a breathing gaslight, I think…an energy…a force…but it obeys its own rules…like natural things all do…got rules, like gravity and such, yet fog has supernatural rules maybe…maybe makes ‘em up as it goes…and that morning I run off from Jake, I…I watched the fog too long, I think, cause I saw Dooley come riding inside it when…when it rose from the earth over his grave.”

“Your child, Katherine? Where is your child?”

“Little Dooley?”

“Yes!”

“Oh…he’s gone.”

“Gone where, Katherine?”

“Gone in the fog.”

“Is he lost in the park?”

“He’s the reason I went to Dooley.”

“What happened to Little Dooley. Katherine?”

“That bastard, Jake, he’ll never hurt no child ever again.”

“Thanks to Dooley?”

“Thanks to Dooley, and the fog, yes.”

“What did Jake do to Little Dooley, Katherine?”

“He broke his neck.”

Jessica dropped her gaze, tears rising. “So why’d Dooley attack your lawyer, Roth?”

“He wanted me to give myself up, but Dooley didn’t like that idea.”

“And Detective Jensen? What’s become of Jensen?”

“He figured this was the case that’d make his career. Dooley said he was using me.”

“He came to see you last night?”

“Yes, asked to see me…but you know there was a heavy fog last night.”

“But with Roth, Katherine, there’s no fog in here.”

“He never quit smoking…like Jake. Look at this place. Full of fog.”

Jessica and Jenni saw no fog, no cigarette butts, nothing to indicate anything out of the ordinary in the room save for Roth lying dead on the floor.

“Dooley says you’re going to hurt me now,” Katherine calmly said to Jessica and Jenni. “Fog makes its on rules…”

Rules of fog, Jessica rolled over the phrase in her mind. Katherine continued, her hands clamped round one another, “Why fog can’t be quantified or figured like other things. Did you know I was a math teacher at the high school? I could go on…tell you more….tell you…”

Katherine never stopped talking after that moment; in fact, talking apparently provided the only defense against Dooley’s ever returning. She had snapped on learning Jake had killed her child.

From time to time, Jessica visited Katherine in the asylum. She did no more than sit and listen to the woman talk non-stop. All of it nonsense and disconnected as a Charles Manson monologue except that from time to time, she’d say, “It was the fog…all to do with the fog.”

For her part, Jenni had put her anger toward Don in a deep, dark place far from her conscious mind and never spoke of him or it ever again. Jessica recognized the symptoms of a woman afraid of her own depth of anger.

After this, Jessica Coran went home nightly to her husband, Richard Sharpe. Whenever a fog rolled in over the farmstead so thick she could not see the horse stable from the front window, she became melancholy and incommunicative and disconsolate. And while Richard pleaded for her to tell him what was troubling her, she could not verbalize it, frustrating him with three words: “Rules of Fog.”

It was the only case she’d never shared with Richard; it was the only case she failed to discuss with anyone—and especially those she loved the most