The Bone Bed

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Maybe he’s just a lousy lawyer.” The high-speed dull thudding of the wipers is almost unbearable. “I don’t guess you could turn those down?”

  “As long as you don’t care if I can’t see.”

  “Never mind.” I can’t remember what I ate today, and then I realize the answer is nothing.

  Cuban coffee and an empty stomach. No wonder my head hurts and I can barely think.

  “Steward didn’t try hard enough to get that Fox segment excluded, hardly tried at all.”

  I never got around to the granola and Greek yogurt that are still in my refrigerator.

  “You ask me, he threw you and the case under the bus, and did it on purpose.”

  “Let’s hope that wasn’t his intention,” I say, and what bothers me most isn’t that a television news segment was ruled admissible and shown to the jury but that the video was filmed at all.

  For several seconds the dead woman’s gaunt leathery face was clearly visible as I was pulling her into the pouch-lined Stokes basket, and while it’s possible she’s no longer visually identifiable because of her severely dehydrated condition, I can’t be sure of that. Someone who knew her well, perhaps family or close friends, might have realized who she is, and that’s a terrible way to find out about a death. It should never happen.

  “He’ll get acquitted,” Marino decides.

  The wipers swipe and beat the glass, the hard, chilly rain drumming the roof and flooding the windshield as if we’re inside a car wash, and Channing Lott might be acquitted, and maybe he should be. I have no idea. But if jurors witnessed what I did barely an hour ago, they must have been given a different picture of the formidable industrialist who seemed genuinely caught off guard by the video he watched in open court. He struck me as tragic and terrified, sincerely grief-stricken, as he seemed to anticipate what he was about to see. Afterward he shut his eyes, almost collapsing in his chair with what appeared to be immense relief.

  If he realized the dead woman isn’t his missing wife, then he shouldn’t have felt he was just granted a reprieve, not if he’s to blame for whatever’s happened to her. Finding his wife’s body right now would be the best thing for his case. It doesn’t matter what I might testify as to how long she’s been dead.

  A jury would find such postmortem artifacts confusing, would be baffled by the idea of an intact body showing up in the Massachusetts Bay some six months after the person allegedly was a murder for hire. I also accept the distinct possibility that Channing Lott is a consummate sociopath, a poseur and manipulator who knew all eyes were on him during that pivotal moment when the news footage began to play. Maybe he intended to look sympathetic to whoever was watching, and he did.

  “He may very well be acquitted, and if the jury has reasonable doubt, then that’s the right verdict,” I reply, and what I’d like to do this very minute is go home.

  I want Advil, a long hot bath, and Scotch on the rocks, and I want to talk to Benton. I want to hear what he has to say about what just transpired in federal court. What are the rumors about Judge Joseph Conry that might help explain his anger toward me and unwillingness to sustain a single objection Dan Steward raised, few that there were? Then again, maybe I don’t want to know. It won’t change anything that’s happened.

  “Well, no way in hell the jury’s going to convict him.” Marino leans forward, squinting, trying to see through billowing sheets of water, the lights of oncoming traffic blinding. “All Donoghue had to do was introduce the suggestion that Mildred Lott’s body just turned up now or might turn up later or maybe she’s not even dead. Showing that news clip was something, a picture worth a thousand words, even though it’s probably not her.”

  “It’s not. Unless her medical records are fabricated and her height has shrunk.”

  “Well, it looks like everything else shrunk.”

  “Not her bones. Mildred Lott was supposed to be five-eleven, and this lady isn’t close to that.”

  “You got to give her credit, though.” Marino continues talking about Jill Donoghue, because he saw every second of what she did, having found a seat in the back of the courtroom without my being aware.

  He was there for the entire ordeal, witnessing the judge’s tirade and my punishment of a fine some five times stiffer than what’s typical, not that I’ve ever been fined before. That judicial fireworks display was a perfect opening for what Donoghue did next, to build me up as a qualified expert before implying that I’m a feminist home wrecker, a medical experimenter guilty by association of snatching Japanese body parts and perhaps even indirectly to blame for atom bombs being dropped. Marino saw all of it and has chatted about nothing else as we’ve driven endlessly, slowly, miserably, through high winds and pounding rain that a few minutes ago was mixed with hail, the early evening unnaturally dark.

  “She saved you for last, and that’s what the jury goes away with—TV footage of a dead rich lady with long platinum-blond hair being pulled out of the water today.”

  “I don’t think her hair’s platinum blond. I’m pretty sure it’s white.” I can barely talk.

  “Reasonable doubt.” Marino wipes the inside of the glass with his jacket sleeve and turns up the defrost full blast. “If they didn’t have doubt before, they got it now.”

  “Whether he’s found guilty or not isn’t my concern,” I reply. “I have no opinion one way or the other about whether he had something to do with his wife’s disappearance, and frankly, you shouldn’t have an opinion, either.”

  “You know what they say. Everybody’s got one.”

  At long last we are here, my metal-clad building an ominous tower in the storm, like the gray turret of a castle shrouded in fog, and I get an odd feeling that begins deep inside my gut, a chilly discomfort that moves up to my chest. The sensation reaches my brain as the black metal gate slides open along its tracks and Marino drives through, the Tahoe’s headlights slashed by rain and illuminating vehicles that shouldn’t be here. Benton’s black Porsche SUV is next to three unmarked sedans, as if he and his FBI colleagues have shown up to meet with me anyway when there just isn’t time, and it doesn’t make sense.

  I sent Benton a text message the instant I was out of court and said tonight was impossible, as I still had the autopsy to do and it likely would be a complicated one. I might not be finished until nine or ten.

  “Who’s here and why?” I puzzle, as Marino points a remote at the back of the building.

  “That’s Machado’s Crown Vic. What the hell?”

  The lights go on inside the bay, the heavy door cranking up, and in the widening space is the dark green low-slung hood of Lucy’s Aston Martin backed in next to my SUV.

  “Shit.” Marino drives inside. “You expecting her?”

  “I’m not expecting anyone.”

  We get out, the shutting of the Tahoe’s doors echoing off concrete, and I scan my thumb in the biometric lock. Then we’re inside the receiving area of the autopsy floor with no sign of the nighttime security guard, but I detect voices along the corridor. People talking, several of them, and as Marino and I approach ID, we find the door open wide. The yellow boat fender, dog crate, and other evidence are plainly visible inside on tables, and as we get closer to the large-scale x-ray room I can hear my technologist Anne. I hear Luke Zenner, and the security guard appears around the bend.

  “Who unlocked ID?” I ask him. “Is everything all right, George?”

  “You got company.” He talks to me and won’t look at Marino.

  “So it seems.”

  “Mr. Wesley and some of his people are in there with Anne and Dr. Zenner. Don’t know what it’s about.”

  I don’t believe he doesn’t know, and he stares straight ahead as he walks off, jaw muscles clenching. The red light is illuminated over the door of the x-ray room, indicating the scanner is in use, and I’m not expecting my husband to be dressed the way he is, in running clothes, his silver hair wetly combed back. He’s with Cambridge Police Detective Sil Machado and FBI Speci
al Agent Douglas Burke and another woman I’ve never seen before, very short dark hair, maybe in her mid-thirties. I’m startled. I feel betrayed.

  “For the most part, it’s the opposite with CT,” Anne is saying from her work station, Luke sitting next to her in a chair he’s rolled up.

  On the other side of the leaded glass, bare feet with shriveled toes and pink-painted clipped nails protrude from the bore of the eggshell-white Siemens SOMATOM Sensation scanner, and on video displays are images belonging to an Unidentified white female from MA Bay, I read. I can’t understand why Anne and Luke have started without me. I made it clear I didn’t want the body removed from the cooler. I gave a specific directive that the body wasn’t to be touched, that the doors to the ID and decomp rooms were to remain locked until I returned from court.

  “What’s going on?” I meet Benton’s eyes and see what’s in them. “What’s happened?”

  He’s in a crimson Harvard Medical School sweat suit and running shoes, a rain jacket draped over an arm, and I suspect he was at the gym when someone interrupted him. Probably 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 got coffee in this place, course what I’d really like is a beer, but forget it.”

  “Let’s back up a minute.” I shut the door. “I thought I’d made it clear not to start this case without me.” I address this to Anne, to Luke. “So if what I’m seeing is the result of the FBI coming in here and giving directives to speed things along, that’s not how it works,” I add, and I’m not nice about it.

  “It’s not like that,” Luke says to me.

  But it is like that.

  “The ID room is wide open, and you’ve started the scan when that wasn’t my instruction,” I reply.

  Luke turns his chair around so he’s facing me, and there’s no sign he’s concerned about my displeasure or worried about why Marino was just removed from the room like a prisoner. Luke feels justified in what’s unfolding, and in part this is due to inexperience, and it may be he’s far more narcissistic than he seems, his well-mannered graciousness belying the ego I’d expect to accompany his blond good looks and gifted mind. My deputy chief is rather enamored of federal law enforcement agencies, the Secret Service and especially the FBI, which has managed to muscle him into rushing this case along, and I simply won’t allow it.

  “I wasn’t going to start the autopsy without you,” Luke explains, in his reasonable, pleasant British accent, dressed in scrubs, surgical clogs, and a lab coat with his name embroidered on it. “But we thought it might be expedient to go ahead and scan her while you were on your way back from court. Mainly because of the condition she’s in, I doubted we’d find much on CT, anyway.”

  “And there’s basically nothing.” Anne’s tone is subdued, unnerved by my reaction to what she and Luke have done, and she’s probably upset about Marino, who flirts and kids with her, and for a while was giving her rides to work every day when she broke her foot. “No internal injuries,” she says quietly, seriously, not looking at Luke or Benton, at anyone but me. “No evidence of what might tell us why she’s dead. I mean, she’s got some cardiac calcifications, some intracranial ones that are common. Punctate in the basal ganglia, plus arachnoid granulations, typical with aging, in people over forty.”

  “Hold on, now.” Special Agent Burke is casual tonight in a brown sweater and black jeans, a leather shoulder bag likely concealing her gun. “Let’s not talk about turning forty.” She thinks she’s funny.

  “Evidence of atherosclerosis, calcification in some blood vessels.” Anne isn’t amused.

  “You can tell hardening of the arteries from a CT scan?” Nothing Burke does is going to lighten the mood. “Seems like that’s a good thing to find out before I eat another Whopper.”

  “Eat what you want; you don’t look like you’ve got a worry,�
�� Luke says to her, and maybe he’s flirting. “They’ve found atherosclerosis in Egyptian mummies four thousand years old, so it’s not just a by-product of modern life. In fact, it’s probably part of our genetic makeup to be predisposed to it,” he adds, because he just doesn’t get it, or maybe he doesn’t care that Marino is in trouble.

  “I suppose we have to consider she might have died from a heart attack or stroke, in other words, natural causes, and someone decided to conceal the body, then get rid of it.” Burke’s eyes are steady on mine.

  “At this stage, it’s wise to consider everything, to keep an open mind,” I answer.

  “Nothing else radio-opaque except dental restorations,” Anne informs me. “And she has plenty of those. Crowns, implants, an expensive mouth.”

  “Ned’s coming in to compare charts,” Luke lets us know. “In fact, that’s probably him now.”

  Car lights are white and glaring on a closed-circuit security screen, a small blue hatchback, Ned Adams’s ancient Honda parking in the lot.

  “Then we must already have premortem x-rays for comparison.” I direct this to Benton.

  “Records we got from a dentist in Florida,” he says.

  “Who do we think this lady is?” I ask him.

  “It’s looking like she’s a forty-nine-year-old Cambridge resident named Peggy Lynn Stanton. She usually spends her summers at Lake Michigan, Kay,” my FBI husband replies, as if we are amicable colleagues. “Much of her time is spent away from Massachusetts. It appears it was her habit to be here usually in the winter and fall only.”

  “It seems strange to spend winters here. That’s usually when people leave,” I remark.

  “Sometimes she’d go to Florida,” Burke says. “There’s a lot to find out, obviously.”

  “Meaning friends, possibly her family, weren’t always sure where she was?” I ask dubiously. “What about telephone calls, e-mail . . . ?”