It’s absolutely absurd, my being subpoenaed by Channing Lott’s attorney, nothing more than harassment and an attempt to intimidate and humiliate, and of course I don’t say that to Steward. I’ll never again say much at all in e-mails or any written communication, and I dread what I imagine will be tomorrow’s headline:

MEDICAL EXAMINER SAYS LOTT’S WIFE TURNED INTO SOAP

Last March on a late Sunday night, Mildred Lott vanished from their oceanfront mansion in Gloucester, some thirty miles north of here. Footage from infrared security cameras shows her opening a door and emerging from the house into the backyard at almost ten o’clock at night. It was very dark out, and she was in a bathrobe and slippers, walking toward the seawall while apparently talking to someone, I’ve been told. The security recording shows that she did not return to the house, and the next morning when her driver appeared to take her to an appointment, she did not answer the door or her phone. Walking around back, he discovered a door wide open and that the alarm system wasn’t set.

Deleted e-mails recovered by the police revealed a cyber-train that led directly to Channing Lott, whose wife isn’t my case. Her body hasn’t been found, and the sole reason for my being summoned to court today is an electronic communication, one I didn’t think twice about last spring, when Dan Steward wanted to know if a body were dumped off the coast of Gloucester that time of year, how long would it take to completely decompose and what would happen to the bones.

I replied that for a while the coldness of the water would actually preserve the body, although fish and other marine life would do some damage. I said it could take as long as a year for saponification, for the body to form adipocere, which is caused by the anaerobic bacterial hydrolysis of fat in tissue. In other words, I made the mistake of saying in my e-mail that a body underwater for a long period of time rather much turns into soap, and it is this comment that Channing Lott’s lawyer wants to confront me with in court today.

“If I end up having to appear at two, it probably is a good idea if you’re with me. I agree,” I say to Marino, because I already know what’s going to happen—that I won’t get out of it. “Maybe Bryce should be with us. I worry there will be a lot of media.”

“What an idiot,” Marino says. “With all his money and he stiffs the hit man?”

“That’s not why I’ve been subpoenaed or my point,” I reply, somewhat impatiently.

“Some dirtbag he hires off the Internet, Craigslist, whatever, and he wonders why he got caught,” Marino says.

“The point I’m making is the abuse of the judicial system,” I reply. “A perverting of fairness.”

We are past the seaport and the massive stone fortification Fort Independence, which protected Boston from the British in the War of 1812, swerving away from Deer Island, where waste-treatment plant sludge digesters look like eggs. The gray sandy shoreline of Hull curves around a harbor packed with small boats, and a graceful white windmill rises from the hills. I let Marino know he should be careful that the same fate doesn’t befall him that has befallen me.