The Bone Bed

by Patricia Cornwell

  “The question, of course, is when she might have gotten these bruises.” I grab the lamp by its handle, shining it down her arms to the shriveled tips of her fingers, with their chipped polished nails that are clipped to the quick.

  I check the undersides of her wrists and the tops of her hands.

  “It’s very difficult, if not impossible, to age these contusions, because of her condition,” I add.

  The light paints over the leathery upper chest, the wasted breasts, illuminating the wrinkled abdomen.

  “But depending on the degree of force used by the person gripping her, she could have been bruised through layers of clothing,” I answer Luke’s question.

  “Important to know if she was clothed or not, it seems to me,” he says. “I realize this is more Benton’s department. I’m not a profiler.”

  “The FBI can be very persuasive.” I illuminate her hips, her upper thighs. “And I’m sure they were all the more convincing to you because Benton showed up with them. But we don’t work for law enforcement, Luke.”

  “Of course not.”

  “It’s our duty to objectively answer questions raised by the evidence.” I direct the light at her knees. “And we must vigorously adhere to chain of custody, meaning we don’t open up our evidence room for the FBI or allow them to whip us into a frenzy of activity, no matter their reason or sense of urgency.”

  “He’s your husband, so I assumed—”

  “Assumed that our being married changes how he does his job or how I do mine?”

  “I apologize,” Luke says again. “But after his annoyance when we were in Vienna . . .”

  He doesn’t finish. He doesn’t need to spell out that the last thing he’d want to do after Benton’s blatant display of jealousy last week is to anger him further. Luke knows he can. He knows why he can, and I’m not going to discuss my marriage with him or the truth about why he might be a threat to Benton.

  I’m not about to openly admit to Luke Zenner that my husband and I have had our share of friction of late, episodes of uncertainty and distrust that aren’t as baseless and irrational as I’ve let on. If what we’ve fought about was truly groundless, Luke and I wouldn’t be dancing this dance of touching, of leaning, of lingering, of speaking the subtle language of heated attraction, and it’s only when it happens that I’m honest with myself.

  “What I can’t help but wonder is if she might have been stripped of her clothing at some point,” Luke says, as I reposition the plastic ruler, the scale, for each photograph I take. “I offer that only because the contusions look quite distinct. Here and here.”

  He moves closer, his forearm touching mine, his shoulder brushing against me as he bends into what he’s examining, and I don’t want to feel what I’m feeling.

  “You can see where it appears someone’s fingertips pressed with considerable force, and I’m wondering if there were layers of fabric in the way.”

  He leans forward, leans into me and stays there.

  “Would the contusions look exactly like this, were that the case?” he asks.

  “We can’t know for a fact whether she was bruised through clothing or not,” I reply.

  “Would it be worthwhile to try the ALS?” He indicates the alternate light source still on the countertop, where Marino plugged it in hours earlier.

  “It’s not going to help.”

  “So that’s a no.” He meets my eyes.

  “If you want to scan her in the very off chance you might visualize any faint or nonvisible bruises we’re missing, assuming we’re missing any brown patterns that are contusions?” I offer in a way that discourages him, because I must.

  “It’s probably ridiculous.”

  “It’s not ridiculous, just illogical,” I reply.

  “I agree. I mean, what are the chances?” he says.

  “The chances of finding the usual evidence the ALS can be most helpful with are next to none.” But that’s really not what I’m discouraging him from, and it’s not really what we’re talking about.

  I won’t have an affair with him unless I decide I don’t care if I completely destroy my life. It’s not about whether he has a chance with me but about how crazy it is that I’m even thinking these thoughts.

  “Body fluids, fibers, gunshot residue, latent prints, deep tissue bruises?” I’m still talking about the ALS and what it might find under different circumstances, and I’m letting him know I understand what it’s like to want what you can’t have.

  “Right. Forget it,” he agrees.

  “That’s what I recommend. Not that I don’t understand being tempted to try.”

  “She’s been in the water,” he says. “A waste of time.”

  “And then it has to be explained,” I add. “Everything we do has to be explained.”

  “Should I unplug it?” He reaches for the ALS power cord.

  “Please,” I reply. “I’m really not interested in putting on goggles and spending an hour scanning the body from head to toe with the Crime-lite just so I can say we did. It might be worth going over her clothing, but that can wait.”

  “We don’t know if she had on the clothing when she got these bruises.” Luke returns to that thought as he returns to the table. “Knowing whether she was dressed or not when someone grabbed her upper arms would be an important fact, wouldn’t it? Stripping a prisoner is more about submission than anything else, isn’t it?”

  “Depends on who is doing it to whom and why.”

  “The logic of torture, a terrible thing to consider, but there is a logic to it. Humiliation, intimidation, controlling your prisoner by stripping him, hooding him. Or her,” he says. “I’m assuming she could have been bound at some point with some type of ligature that was soft and wouldn’t necessarily leave marks on her skin.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “I imagine him coming up behind her like this.” He holds up his hands to grip imaginary arms, orienting his fingertips and thumbs the way they would be if he grabbed someone by the upper arms from behind. “Maybe to forcibly move her from one place to another, such as if he forced her into a room or dragged her, were she unconscious. Or if she were tied up in a chair and he’s trying to make her give him information so he could steal her identity, for example. Her PIN, her passwords.”

  I shine the lamp down her lower legs, brightly illuminating the tops and sides of her ankles and feet, and I find more brownish marks, only these are darker and drier and indistinct in their shape. Picking up the scalpel to make small incisions, I find the darkened areas of skin have lost elasticity, are extremely hard, with no evidence of hemorrhage to the underlying tissue. Not contusions but patterns caused by something else, and I find more of them on the tops of her bare feet and areas of her ankles.

  We pull her on her side so I can check her back, and there are two more indistinct hard brown areas on the underside of her right elbow and forearm.

  “I’ve got no idea,” I puzzle. “Absolutely none.”

  “Some type of postmortem artifact?”

  “Unlike any I’ve ever seen before.” I excise a small section of the hard brown skin for histology. “It’s like cutting through stiff leather. I can’t imagine what might cause that, swaths of skin as much as four by three inches.”

  “Like freezer burn, perhaps?”

  “No. She’d have it all over if she was in a freezer and it caused that.”

  “But what about if certain parts of the body came in contact with metal inside a freezer?” he suggests.

  “Then the skin would stick.”

  I insert the tip of the scalpel blade into leathery flesh just below the left sternum and incise down and to the right, and then do the same on the left and cut straight down to the navel, detouring around it to the pubic bone. It’s like making a Y-incision in wet slippery leather, and I reflect back tissue, cutting through ribs, removing the breastplate of them. I make an incision beneath the jaw to remove the neck organs and tongue.

  “Her hyoid�
��s intact.” I make notes on a body diagram as I work, the odor of decomposition overpowering now. “No sign of injury to the strap muscles, to soft tissue. No airway obstruction or aroma of chemical asphyxia, such as due to cyanide. No injury to the tongue.”

  Luke peels back the scalp, and the air vibrates with the loud whining and grinding of the oscillating saw, and bone dust is suspended in the bright white light. I open the major blood vessels, the inferior vena cava, the aorta, finding what I expect, that they are empty, with dry diffuse hemolytic staining. I see no evidence of blockage or injury or disease, just a moderate amount of calcification, certainly not enough to kill her.

  “The brain’s too soft to section,” Luke reports. “But I’m not seeing anything to suggest cerebral injury. Dura’s intact and free of staining.” He writes it down.

  Her organs are decomposed. Her lungs are collapsed, reddish-purple and very soft, the airways devoid of water, froth, sand, or foreign material, the gallbladder dry and wrinkled, with no residual bile. With each minute we work it becomes abundantly clear that this is an autopsy of exclusion, of ruling out possible causes of death and leaving little doubt that she either asphyxiated or was poisoned. But it will be a while—days, at least—before we have a complete ethanol and drug screen of liver tissue.

  “No petechiae I can find.” Luke opens each eye. “No irregular areas of hemorrhage to the sclera or the conjunctiva. Of course, that doesn’t rule out asphyxia by smothering or strangulation,” he adds, and he’s right.

  While there are no abrasions or contusions, no injuries I might associate with smothering or strangulation, the absence of facial or scleral pinpoint hemorrhages called petechiae doesn’t mean that someone didn’t place a plastic bag over her head or tie a gag around her nose and mouth or ram a cloth down her throat that obstructed her breathing.

  Her gastric contents are granular and dry like animal feed. I adjust the light and use a lens, moving the material around with forceps.

  “Dried out, desiccated meat,” I observe. “If I can see it grossly, it wasn’t very digested when she died.”

  “There’s very little in her small intestine,” Luke lets me know. “Almost nothing in her large intestine. It usually takes what? A good ten hours for food to completely clear?”

  “It depends on a lot of things. How much she ate, whether she exercised, her hydration. Digestion varies considerably with individuals.”

  “So if she ate and the food hardly had begun to digest before she died,” he supposes, “chances are we’re talking only a couple of hours after her last meal?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  I tell him to weigh the gastric contents and place some of it in formalin so we can process it histologically.

  “An iodine test for starch, napthol for sugar, Oil Red O for lipids. Hopefully we can pick out identifiable food particles on the stereomicroscope.” I explain the special stains I’ll want used.

  We are working side by side, our backs to the door.

  “So I’m going to make evidence rounds to tox, to histology, to trace, with special instructions,” Luke goes down the list. “What about SEM?”

  “Maybe for botanicals.” I’m vaguely aware of a shift in the air behind me. “For stomatal comparisons. For example, is it napa cabbage? Is it Chinese broccoli? Is it bok choy? Is there any evidence of arthropods such as shrimp? Are there cellular structures that might be oats? Are there cereal grains that might be wheat?”

  Luke turns around, and then I do.

  “I’m wondering how much longer,” Benton says, from the open door he holds.

  “Didn’t hear you come in,” Luke replies, as if making a point.

  “We’re actually finishing up now.” I meet Benton’s eyes, and his are wary.

  “Find anything helpful?” He stands in the doorway.

  “The long answer is undetermined for now, pending toxicology and further studies.” I untie my gown in back. “The short answer is I don’t know.”

  “Not even a guess?” Benton stares at what’s on the table, and the reason he doesn’t come closer isn’t because of the odor or the ugliness.

  He isn’t bothered by such things. He’s bothered by something else.

  “I’m not going to guess about what killed her.” I toss my gloves and shoe covers into a biohazard can. “But I can give you a long list of what didn’t.”

  twenty-two

  HEAVY RAINS HAVE TURNED TORRENTIAL, THE VIOLENT storm unseasonable for fall, with high winds stripping trees of any leaves left and thunder cracking like a war going on. Water sprays the undercarriage of the SUV and splashes the glass, and Benton seems miles from me as I drive through the dark puddled streets of mid-Cambridge.

  “It’s common sense that he can’t be involved,” he says from the passenger’s seat, where he’s alert to his surroundings and not looking at me.

  “Whose common sense?” I try not to sound tense.

  “Do you want him leaving his DNA inside her house?”

  “Hopefully he wouldn’t, but of course not.” I try to sound reasonable.

  Benton’s phone glows in the dark, and he types something on it.

  “After he’s possibly already transferred his DNA to her personal effects, to her clothing?” He returns the phone to his lap. “Because I’m betting he handled all sorts of things.”

  Wipers thud and the defrost blasts.

  “I don’t care what protective shit he had on,” Benton then says. “These days you can get DNA from air.”

  “Not quite,” I reply. “But he shouldn’t search her house.” I agree with that. “Although there’s no proof he knew her, ever met her, or had a clue someone stole her identity on Twitter. There’s no shred of evidence he’s done anything wrong.”

  “It doesn’t look good.”

  “It looks like what it is.” My anger glints. “Someone intended to implicate him.”

  “We shouldn’t do anything to make it look worse.”

  “So I lose my chief investigator because he got set up and made a fool of by whoever’s involved?” I’m frustrated, on the verge of furious, that the FBI suddenly assumes it has a say in how I run my office.

  I’m angered by the suggestion that investigators I train leave their DNA everywhere.

  “He was set up because he was an intended target,” I add.

  “He needs to stay out of this case. He needs to stay away from the CFC for a while.”

  “That’s what you think or what your colleagues think?” Lightning flashes and the sky looks bruised.

  “It’s not for me to decide how Marino should be handled. It’s not appropriate for me to decide, in light of personal connections. In light of our history.” Benton doesn’t look at me, and I know when he’s wounded.

  “It seems if anyone should decide, it’s the one who knows him best.”

  “Yes, I know him,” he says.

  “You certainly do. And your colleagues don’t.”

  “Not the way I know him. You’re right about that. And maybe you should think about what I know.”

  “I should think about what you know of Marino’s flaws.” It’s obvious what he’s alluding to, and I can’t stop this from where it’s going.

  “Flaws. Christ,” he says.

  “Don’t do this, Benton.”

  “Yes, flaws,” he says.

  “Goddammit, stop.”

  “What a way to put it,” he says, in the voice of anger, of hurt.

  “You’re finally paying him back?” I ask.

  “Nothing more than a flaw or two.”

  “You’re going to pay him back at last for a night when he was drunk and on medication?” I go ahead and say it. “When he was out of his mind?”

  “The oldest excuse in the history of the world. Blame it on pills. Blame it on booze.”

  “This isn’t helpful.”

  “Plead insanity when you sexually assault someone.”

  “Please don’t tell me what happened then has a bearing on d
ecisions you’re making now,” I say to him. “I know you wouldn’t throw him to the wolves for a mistake he made years ago. One he couldn’t be sorrier for.”

  “Marino throws himself to the wolves. He’s his own wolf.”

  I drive past a construction site where bulldozers parked in muddy rivers of rainwater remind me of prehistoric creatures stranded, of floods, of life swept away. My every thought is dark and morbid and honed by the fear that Benton stood silently inside the doorway of the decomp room to send me a message. I fear the flaws he’s really talking about aren’t Marino’s. They’re mine.

  “Please don’t punish him because of me,” I say quietly. “He’s not a predator. He’s not a rapist.”

  Benton doesn’t respond.

  “He’s certainly not a murderer.”

  Benton is silent.

  “Marino’s been framed; if nothing else he’s been discredited, been humiliated by Peggy Stanton’s killer.” I look at Benton as he stares straight ahead. “Please don’t use it as an opportunity to punish.” I mean as an opportunity to punish me.

  The SUV splashes through water that has pooled in low-lying areas, broken branches littering the street, as neither of us speak, and the silence convinces me of what I suspect. The space between us is vast and empty, as rain billows in sheets and dead leaves dart and swarm in the dark like bats.

  “He was set up, yes. That much I believe,” Benton finally says, almost wearily. “God knows why anyone would bother. He’s perfectly capable of setting himself up. He doesn’t fucking need help.”

  “Where is he? I hope he’s not alone right now.”

  “With Lucy. He’s managed to make his compromised position much worse because of his rude defensive behavior.”

  I glance in the mirrors, my eyes watering in glaring headlights as cars go past.

  “Acting like a defiant, uncooperative total jerk,” Benton continues, and his tone has changed, as if he let me know what he wants me to know, and it’s enough.

  “I’m not surprised he’s beside himself,” I hear myself say, as I’m realizing something else entirely.