The Bone Bed

by Patricia Cornwell

  “We sent agents to check,” Burke says. “Well, why don’t you pick up here?” She directs this to the woman I don’t know. “Valerie Hahn’s with our cyber squad.”

  “And for the record, everybody calls me Val.” She smiles at me, and she shouldn’t bother.

  I don’t feel friendly and am consumed by worry. What has Marino done?

  “The bottom line is it certainly appears she never got to her cottage on the lake,” Valerie Hahn says. “It’s totally abandoned. No luggage. Nothing in the fridge. It’s looking like she vanished into thin air around the first of May, possibly earlier, and Dr. Zenner mentioned that could be consistent with the condition of the body?”

  “I’ll know better when we autopsy her.” It rankles me that Luke has told them anything.

  “I don’t know if you might have heard her mentioned?” Valerie Hahn says to me.

  I open the door leading out into the corridor, where Ned Adams is headed toward us, carrying his old black leather medical bag.

  “Why would I have heard her mentioned?” I ask bluntly.

  “I’m just wondering if the name Pretty Please means anything to you, or perhaps anyone on your staff?” Hahn says.

  “Hello, Ned.” I hold open the door for him. “She’s in the scanner. Help yourself.”

  “I can do it in there. Sure.” He pushes back the hood of a long yellow raincoat that is dripping water on the floor. “Her films are up to date. Lots of crowns, implants, root canals, including a panoramic x-ray that’s good of the sinuses. You got those?”

  “I can put them up on the screens even as we speak.” Anne starts typing. “You want a printout, too?”

  “An old-fashioned guy like me still likes paper. She has lots of features, an embarrassment of riches, shouldn’t take long. Are we hot?” He pauses at the door leading into the scanning room as if it’s a military operations area that might be dangerous.

  “The scanner’s offline,” I tell him. “You know how to slide out the table?”

  “I do.” He takes off his coat.

  “Presumably because her initials are PLS,” Douglas Burke explains. “One might suspect that’s where please comes from.”

  “You’re on Twitter, aren’t you, Kay?” Valerie Hahn acts as if we’re friends.

  “Barely.” I’m beginning to understand, or I think I do. “I don’t use it to socialize or communicate.”

  “Well, I know you never tweeted Peggy Lynn Stanton, whose handle on Twitter is Pretty Please,” Hahn says.

  “I don’t tweet anyone.”

  Marino, what have you done?

  “It’s easy enough to see that you two weren’t tweeting each other.” Hahn is quite sure of herself. “One doesn’t even need admin privileges to see that.”

  “I don’t think we need to get into this level of detail right now.” Benton watches Ned Adams through glass.

  “I think we do.” I look at him until he looks at me.

  “Suffice it to say that at least something useful came from all the television coverage.” I can read Benton’s reluctance in the flatness of his eyes. “Our office in Boston got phone calls, Cambridge got phone calls, Chicago and Florida got calls, at least a dozen people certain the dead woman is Peggy Stanton, whom these people said they haven’t seen or heard from, apparently, since at least May, when she was supposed to be on her way to her Lake Michigan cottage or possibly Palm Beach. People here assumed she was in Illinois and people up there assumed she was still here. Some people assumed she was in Florida.”

  “People? As in friends?” It is all I can do to mask how much I don’t like this.

  “Various volunteer groups and churches.” Benton knows exactly what I’m feeling, but it doesn’t matter.

  This is how we do our jobs. This is how we live.

  “Apparently she was very involved in eldercare. Here, in Chicago, in Florida,” he says.

  “She has family and they haven’t wondered where she is after all these months?” I think about what Marino said to me in the car this morning when we were on our way to the Coast Guard base.

  “Her husband and two kids died thirteen years ago when their private plane crashed.” Benton reports the information objectively, and he can sound so cold.

  But that’s not who he is.

  “An investment broker with a hefty life insurance policy,” he reports. “Left her fairly well off, not that she was poor to begin with.”

  “None of her vendors have complained that she’s not paying her bills? No one noticed she wasn’t answering e-mails or her phone?” I don’t say what I’m thinking.

  How simple it would be to hoodwink Marino in cyberspace, where he doesn’t know how to navigate and his insecurity makes him vulnerable.

  “She’s been paying her bills all this time,” Benton replies. “She was tweeting as recently as two weeks ago. She’s made calls from her cell phone as recently as the day before yesterday—”

  “Not the person in there. She certainly didn’t.” Luke interrupts Benton while watching Ned Adams through the window.

  “Someone’s been doing it.” Benton finishes what he was saying, but he doesn’t say it to Luke.

  Inside the scanner room, Ned Adams opens his black leather bag. He puts his glasses on. He squints up at a video screen displaying dental x-rays.

  “She’s been dead quite a lot longer than two days or two weeks,” Luke volunteers, when he really should shut up. “She certainly hasn’t been tweeting or writing checks or making phone calls for quite some time. Months, at least, I’d say. Would you agree, Dr. Scarpetta?”

  “Her house is on Sixth Street,” Benton says to me. “Very close to Cambridge P.D., which just makes this all the more curious. No one’s been in it. The alarm is set, the car in the garage, police driving past it every day, and no one the wiser.”

  “A time capsule,” Douglas Burke adds. “The fire department’s at the ready to breach the back door as soon as we get there.”

  “I suggest you might want to go pick up those pizzas I asked you to order,” I say to Benton in a way that communicates exactly what I want him to know.

  This is my office. The CFC doesn’t answer to the FBI. I will handle this case as I see fit.

  “I’m posting her first. Her house can wait,” I add, in the same tone. “It’s waited half a year. It can wait two hours longer, but she can’t.”

  “We were hoping Dr. Zenner could take care of the autopsy and you’d come with us and take a look,” Burke suggests.

  “Whatever you need me to do.” Luke gets up from his chair as Anne walks into the scanner room and hands printouts to Ned Adams.

  “What I need is for you to give us a chance to do our job here,” I reply, as the x-ray room door opens, and now Lucy is here, looking at me from the corridor. “Searching a potential crime scene is much more meaningful if we know how the victim died and what we might be looking for.”

  “Could I see you for a minute?” Lucy doesn’t step inside.

  “If you’ll excuse me. I think we’re done for now,” I say to the FBI.

  “I noticed your car in the bay.” I walk with Lucy back toward the receiving area, stopping where no one can overhear us. “I’m wondering why.”

  “And I’m wondering a lot of things.” My niece is dressed the way she was when I saw her early this morning, all in black, and it’s not like her to show up when the FBI is in the area. “I’m wondering why Marino and Machado are in the break room with the door shut. I can hear them arguing, that’s how loud Marino is. And I’m wondering why a Sikorsky S-Seventy-six belonging to Channing Lott might have filmed you recovering that body from the water today?”

  “His helicopter? That’s stunning.” I hardly know what to say.

  With all that’s gone on since, I haven’t given the large white helicopter another thought since I e-mailed the tail number to Lucy while I was in the car with Marino, heading to court.

  “That’s really rather unbelievable,” I add, as my thoughts
dart through possibilities of what I should do.

  Dan Steward needs to know before closing arguments. If Channing Lott somehow is behind his helicopter filming what we just watched in court, and I don’t know how he couldn’t be, then the jury should know before it begins to deliberate. But it may be too late for that.

  “The Certificate of Airworthiness is registered in Delaware to his shipping company,” Lucy informs me.

  I can imagine how it would appear if I call Steward with this information and he’s forced to say in open court or even to the judge who the source is. The information would be damaging to Jill Donoghue.

  Stay out of it.

  “His fleet of some hundred and fifty car carriers, container ships, the M V Cipriano Lines,” my niece is telling me.

  “I’m sorry.” I try to focus on what she’s saying.

  “What the chopper’s registered to,” she says. “A shipping company named after his missing wife, Mildred Vivian Cipriano. Her name before they got married.”

  twenty-one

  AROUND THE CFC, FORENSIC DENTIST NED ADAMS IS known as the tooth whisperer because of what the dead confide in him. Age, economic status, hygiene, and if that’s not enough to tattle about, teeth snitch on diet, drink, drugs, and if the person were pregnant or had acne or an eating disorder.

  In his late sixties, slightly stooped, with bad knees and a deeply wrinkled face that has smiled more than frowned, Ned can determine minutiae from a single tooth that the deceased’s closest friends and family likely never knew or imagined. Peggy Lynn Stanton, he confirms, as we wheel her body along the corridor after weighing and measuring it in the receiving area, was victimized in life by a very bad dentist, who, as Ned puts it, cost her or someone “an arm and a leg.”

  “A Dr. Pulling; now, how’s that for a name? Only he sure didn’t live up to it in her case, as I’m about to tell you.” Ned stiffly accompanies Luke and me toward the decomp cooler, his raincoat draped over his arm, a buoyant air about him, because his mission is successfully accomplished and he’s in no hurry to go home to an empty house. “Some cosmetic dentist in Palm Beach, Florida, who didn’t comply with the standard of care; not saying it was intentional. Maybe just incompetence.”

  “Yeah, right,” Luke says sarcastically. “Where’s the loot?”

  “Tooth number eight, a maxillary central incisor with extensive internal root resorption coupled with a buccal fistula,” Ned says. “You can’t miss this big internal radiolucency in the middle of the pulp canal in her pre- and postmortem radiographs.”

  “This is under a crown?” I pull up the handle of the cooler door.

  “Exactly. Trauma resulting in an infection and ongoing inflammation that went unchecked, and he slapped a porcelain crown on top of it anyway. I’m guessing this joker cost her about forty-K, all told, and a lot of pain and inconvenience. Her bite’s messed up, I’m pretty sure, but can’t prove it because I can’t exactly ask her if she suffered chronic headaches. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had TMJ, though. When you go to search her house, look for a night guard.”

  As if that’s the most important thing I might find.

  “The time frame for when the infection started?” I guide the gurney through frigid air stale with death, pushing past a silent sad audience of black-pouched mounds on steel trays, many of the patients stored here still unidentified.

  “It’s hard to pinpoint, but based on her charts?” Ned’s breath fogs out. “I’d say it’s related to a root canal two and a half years ago, which was followed by the porcelain crown this past March.”

  “So she was in Palm Beach as recently as March,” I assume, as we exit through the rear cooler door that opens onto the decomp room.

  “She must have been.” Ned follows us in. “And it’s impossible for me to believe that by then the resorption hadn’t already progressed to involve the periodontal ligament space and the tooth. In other words, that damn tooth should have been extracted and not restored.”

  “Yet one more crook in the world,” Luke says.

  “Well, had she lived, she inevitably would have faced an extraction followed by an implant and another crown.” Ned sets his black bag on a countertop and drapes his coat over a chair as if he plans to stay for a while. “Lots of root canals—eight, to be exact—likely from trauma caused by drilling down healthy teeth for crowns that I doubt she needed. Her rear molars, for example? Why bother putting porcelain on teeth no one’s going to see? Use gold. Believe it or not, it’s cheaper.”

  “Money, money, money.” Luke hands me a mask and gloves, his blue eyes calmly on mine, as if he can explain everything that’s happened, as if I should have no reason to be concerned about him.

  “That and this same dentist was also doing facial injections,” Ned lets us know, as Luke and I put on shoe covers and gowns. “The newest trend that I have serious qualms about? Dentists injecting patients with Perlane, Restylane, Juvéderm, and other facial fillers, and also Botox. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but I don’t think dentists should be plumping up cheeks and smoothing out frown lines.”

  We slide the body from the gurney to an autopsy table, and she looks tragically small and wizened on cold stainless steel. Turning on an examination light, I move it along its overhead track as Luke labels specimen containers on a cart, and my feelings about him are mixed and confusing. They’re ambivalent and scary, and I try not to think about the outrageous accusations Marino made in the car this morning. I don’t want to admit they might have merit.

  “So this Dr. Pulling, who saw her in March, also injected her with fillers or Botox during that appointment?” I direct six thousand foot-candles of light at the anterior upper arms.

  “Lip augmentation. One CC of Restylane,” Ned says. “It’s in her chart. At least the guy kept pretty good records.”

  “Four small contusions.” I direct Luke’s attention to them. “With another one here.”

  “A thumb bruise?” He reaches for the light’s handle, his arm lightly touching me.

  “Possibly. On the opposite side. Very possibly a thumb bruise. Yes.” I show him, and he leans against me.

  “Fingertip bruises from gripping her,” he describes. “Gripping her upper arm, four fingers there and the thumb here.”

  “Thank you, Ned.” It’s my way of letting him know I’ve got what I need.

  “At least it’s not one of these situations that I see all too often.” He picks up his black medical bag, worn and scuffed, a wedding gift from his wife, who’s dead. “All sorts of things charted that were never done so the dentist could submit claims to the insurance company or disguise noncovered services as those that are covered. Not to mention just plain shoddy work.”

  “It’s really difficult to see, in her condition.” Luke uses a hand lens to examine the subtle contusions I’ve pointed out, and I’m aware of the whisper of his white gown moving as he moves, the intense light shining on his pale blond hair.

  “It helps to illuminate areas at different angles, getting an overview before doing a close visual exam of a particular feature or features,” I suggest to him, as I feel the heat of him and the heat of the lamp. “The same way you enter a crime scene. The big picture first. Then narrow it down. Don’t fixate so much on one thing that you miss all of it.”

  “I certainly wouldn’t want to be so fixated I miss all of it.” Luke adjusts the light again.

  “Had a case not all that long ago that I was called in to consult on.” Ned collects his raincoat from the chair. “In New Hampshire, several patients with broken dental tools in their teeth.”

  “Thanks so much, Ned.” I look up at him. “You saved the day, as always, and I’m grateful, the FBI is grateful, everybody’s grateful.”

  He lingers by the door. “That particular dentist is up to his eyeballs in more than a hundred civil malpractice suits.”

  “Benton ran out to pick up pizza, and I’m guessing he’s back by now,” I let Ned know.

  “He’ll probably be going
to prison for a few years and could be deported back to Iran.”

  “Maybe check on the seventh floor?” I suggest. “I’m sure they’d love your company, if you’re not in a hurry to get home.”

  “Maybe a few here as well?” Luke points out more brown spots, small and almost perfectly round, his arm touching mine, and I feel its firmness through the Tyvek sleeve. “If a grip was intermittent? Like we see when someone is being forcibly held, and the grip tightens and relaxes, tightens and relaxes. Would you expect fingertip bruises through her layers of clothing?”

  I pick up a camera and the six-inch scale Marino labeled earlier today.

  “Would you expect her to bruise like this through a blouse and a wool jacket?” Luke asks, and I begin to take photographs, because Marino isn’t here.

  While I don’t know exactly what is happening, I’ve gathered he’s still upstairs, being questioned by Machado and the FBI, their interest related to Twitter, to the woman Lucy told me about. Someone Marino met on the Internet and recently unfollowed in more ways than one, my niece said early this morning, when she informed me that he’d been sleeping over at the CFC on an AeroBed.

  Twat was the crude word Marino used while we were driving to the Coast Guard base, and whatever foolishness he got involved in, it’s simply not possible he recently was tweeting Pretty Please, or whatever name Peggy Lynn Stanton went by on the Internet. Marino may have been tweeting someone with that handle days and weeks ago, but it wasn’t this lady on the autopsy table. She was dead long before he began tweeting whoever he assumed she was, dead before he even got his Twitter account, possibly dead and in cold storage since the spring, and my mind sorts through information nonstop, my blood pounding.

  My thoughts race to connections and possibilities, my pulse rushing hard. I try to distract myself from what I’m feeling as Luke touches me, as he brushes against me and I don’t stop it.

  “I really didn’t mean to step over you,” he says, now that Ned is gone. “I sincerely apologize. I thought I was helping.”

  I incise the brownish marks on the upper right arm to see if they are well defined beneath the epidermis. I look for staining left by hemorrhage that extends into the dermis or the deeper layer of the skin, and it does.