The Bone Bed

by Patricia Cornwell

  “With bells on.”

  “And if you happen upon paperwork such as vet records or bills? Maybe something will have the cat’s name on it?”

  “She could have one of those chips.”

  “I’ll have her scanned at the vet’s office,” I reply. “Maybe Bryce can take her in tomorrow. We’ll see if there’s an ID number we can check with the National Pet Registry.”

  I get off the phone, turning right on White Street, and feel terrible that I don’t know what to call her.

  “I’m really sorry, but I can’t just call you ‘the cat,’” I say to her, and she purrs loudly. “If you could talk you could tell me who put you out of the house, what bad person did that. Not just a person who isn’t nice but an evil one, and I suspect you were scared of him because you sensed what he really is. A man nobody thinks twice about. But he’s cruel. And you picked up on it, didn’t you, when he let himself inside your house? You wouldn’t come up to him until he tricked you with those treats I saw on the counter?”

  I stroke her flat-eared head, and she rubs her face against my palm.

  “Or maybe you ran out the door. Maybe you fled. I’ll buy you a bag of treats. The same thing, salmon Greenies, because I know that’s what your mother bought for you, lots and lots of bags of them in a cupboard. And grain-free turkey and salmon, which I also saw in the kitchen, plenty of it. She made sure you were well fed, had lots of healthy things to eat, didn’t she? You don’t seem to have fleas, but I’ll give you a bath and get you cleaned up, so you’re probably going to be angry with me.”

  It’s almost midnight as I pull into the Shaw’s supermarket parking lot, illuminated with tall light standards and bordered by bare trees moving in a wind that has died down considerably.

  “I guess I could call you Shaw, since this is our first outing together.” I park near the brick columned entrance. “I apologize I don’t know who you are exactly, and I don’t want you to worry, but I’m going to have to leave you in the car for a few minutes because I don’t have anything at home for a cat. Only things for a dog, his very boring fish diet and sweet-potato treats. An old greyhound named Sock who is very shy and probably will be afraid of you.”

  I leave her wrapped in the towel in the driver’s seat, shut the door, and am pointing the remote to lock it when headlights blind me as another car turns in. For an instant I can’t see, and then a window rolls down and Sil Machado is grinning at me.

  “Hey, what’s doing, Doc?”

  “Cat shopping.” I walk over to his Crown Vic. “You following me?”

  “We sure it’s really her cat?” He shifts the car into park and props an arm on the door frame. “And yeah. I’m following you. Somebody’s got to.”

  “Logic would tell you it’s her cat. But I don’t know it for a fact. She certainly seems lost and homeless.” I look around at the almost empty lot, at someone rolling a shopping cart at the far end of it. “Are you coming inside?”

  “Don’t need anything at the store,” he replies. “Just making sure you get home okay.”

  It seems a strange thing for him to say.

  “I know you’re used to riding around all over the place at all hours. But I’m just making sure,” he repeats.

  “Do you know something I don’t?” I notice bags of evidence in the dark backseat, including those I collected.

  “Someone who’s familiar with Cambridge, right?”

  “Someone who’s familiar with her house, her neighborhood. Someone who made himself familiar, anyway.” I step back to look through the driver’s window of my SUV, making sure the cat’s okay.

  She’s sitting up on the towel.

  “Getting her mail out of the box, right? Maybe emptying her garbage and rolling out her can?” Machado looks at me, and he’s as serious and unyielding as granite. “So I’m thinking this guy’s way too comfortable around here. Knows when to get mail out of her box, probably at least once a week? Knows when garbage collection is. I hate what happened back there. I mean, Burke was out of bounds.”

  “I don’t know how much mail she got.” I’m not going to discuss what he’s just brought up.

  “Me and Marino ride Harleys together. Which is how we got in tight.” Machado stares past me. “He drops by with pizza, to have coffee, sometimes we meet up at the gym, a real good guy and respects the hell out of you. I had no idea. I mean, I don’t know what to say except I know what he feels about you. I know he’d take a bullet.”

  “I’m assuming this person was getting her mail once a week or a couple times a month at an hour when he’s not likely to be seen. The obvious point would be he didn’t want to raise suspicions and have people looking for her while he still had her body, storing it wherever he did for months.” I’m not going to talk about Marino with him. “Do you have that keychain with you?”

  “Okay, sure.” He reaches over the back of the seat and finds the brown paper bag.

  He opens it and pulls out a smaller bag that has the car key inside it, and he hands it out the window to me.

  “Never had a case where someone’s this brazen. Well, it’s not normal, Doc.”

  “When is murder normal?” I hold the transparent bag up and illuminate it with the light from my phone.

  “So you think it’s some sicko who lives in a sick fantasy world, but he looks like the average man on the street.”

  “What do you think?” The car key is infrared, with a battery, the compass attached to it by a quick-key-release chain with a split ring at either end.

  “Yeah, no doubt about it. Someone who blends. Someone no one thinks twice about.”

  “A pull-apart key holder that looks fairly new.” I hand the bag back to him. “Connecting the key of an eighteen-year-old Mercedes to a compass that’s vintage.”

  “Vintage meaning what? Like as old as the car?” He returns the plastic bag to the brown paper one.

  “Meaning I think you’re going to find Girl Scouts haven’t used compasses like this one in recent memory. I’m going to guess at least fifty years.”

  “You kidding me? So maybe it was Peggy Stanton’s.”

  “She was forty-nine, so it was before her time, too, and it depends on where she got the compass or where someone did.” I check on the cat again. “An old compass, an old coin ring, and antique buttons sewn on the jacket she had on? Someone into history and collectibles, but who?”

  “You go on in,” Machado says. “I’m going to wait and follow you home, just to make sure. I’d feel better.”

  I head to the green awning over the entrance and go inside, rolling a cart to the aisle for pet supplies, where I find a litter box and scoop, and clumping litter, Wellness food and treats, and several toys. I find soothing oatmeal and flea shampoos and a nail trimmer, and when I return to my SUV and open the back door, Shaw is sitting on the backseat with her hind legs straight out, the way Scottish Folds sit, which is unlike the way any other cats sit.

  “Come on.” I pick her up, conscious of Machado parked nearby with his headlights burning. “Let’s get you back in the towel and in my lap, okay?”

  She doesn’t fight or resist me in the slightest as I drive home with Machado right behind me, and I wonder what he’s worried about. I can’t help but suspect he knows something he’s not saying, and maybe it’s related to Marino, but it seems impossible that Machado could think for even a minute that Marino has anything to do with Peggy Stanton’s death or a missing paleontologist. But it depends on what Machado’s been told, especially if Burke’s the one doing the telling.

  I drive south, cutting over to Garfield, to Oxford, working my way toward Harvard’s divinity school, to Norton’s Woods, where the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is dark on its densely wooded acres. The pavement hisses wetly beneath my tires, Machado right behind me as I turn off Kirkland and onto Irving Street. Our three-story Federal-style house is white, with black shutters and a slate roof, and I can’t tell if Benton is home. I pull into our narrow brick driveway and park to
one side of the detached garage, and Machado stops on the street and waits as I get groceries and Shaw out of my car.

  I unlock the door of the glassed-in porch, and the alarm begins to beep. Entering the code, I step inside and shove the door shut with my hip as Sock’s nails click over hardwood from the direction of the living room. Benton isn’t here. I can feel Shaw tense up inside the towel as Sock appears along the hallway, and I can’t properly greet him.

  “We have a visitor,” I talk to our rescue brindle greyhound, who has a graying muzzle and is never in a hurry. “And you two are going to be friends.”

  I turn on lights as I pass through rooms, and inside my kitchen of cherry cabinets and stainless-steel appliances I set down shopping bags and shut Shaw inside the pantry so she doesn’t wander off or hide. I take Sock out to the backyard, where my rose garden has lost its last blooms and the stained-glass window in the stairwell is backlit and vibrant. I apologize to Sock for getting home so late, and I know from e-mails that the housekeeper last let him out at five and gave him several treats. But he hasn’t been fed, unless Benton took care of it, and I feel like a negligent mother.

  Sock is a lean, long-legged silhouette sniffing his pointed nose, moving like a shadow through the yard with its stone wall that neighborhood children like to climb over, and he has his favorite spots where there are no motion-sensor lights. Then he follows me back inside, and I feed him and pet him and begin to fill a sink with warm water as I gather towels and wonder where Benton is.

  “I haven’t had a cat in a while,” I talk to her as I retrieve her from the pantry and she purrs. “And I know you aren’t going to be happy, but try to think of it as a spa.”

  I pull a chair out from the kitchen table and place her in my lap and clip her claws.

  “Well, it seems you’ve had that done before, but maybe not a bath. Cats hate water, or that’s what we’re told, but tigers like to swim, so who knows what’s true.”

  I put on rubber gloves and lower her into the warm water, lathering her with flea shampoo and finishing with oatmeal, and she looks at me with her big, round eyes and I start to cry.

  I don’t know why.

  “You’re quite the sport.” I rub her with a big, soft towel. “I’ve never seen a cat that’s such a good sport.”

  I wipe my eyes.

  “You’re more like a dog.” I look at Sock, who is in his bed near the door. “Both of you orphaned rather much the same way.”

  I cry some more.

  “The people you were with aren’t around anymore, and then I bring you home with me and I realize it’s not the same.”

  I can’t begin to imagine what animals remember or know, but Shaw may have been Peggy Stanton’s best friend and saw who killed her and can’t tell me. She can’t tell anyone. Now this mute witness is inside my house, sprawled out on her back on top of a towel, in a position no dignified cat would ever be in. I close the pocket doors and look in the freezer for what I might warm up, and I’m not interested in any of it. I open a bottle of Valpolicella and pour a glass, and decide on fresh pasta with a simple tomato sauce, and I return to the pantry. Shaw is by my feet.

  I retrieve cans of whole peeled tomatoes and melt salted butter in a saucepan and add an onion sliced in half. She rubs against my legs, purring.

  “If Benton were here we might grill Italian sausage outside,” I say to the cat. “Yes, it’s cold and wet, but that wouldn’t stop me. Don’t look worried. I won’t. Not out there in the dark all alone.”

  It enters my mind that Machado hopefully has left, and I remember to reset the alarm, and I boil salted water. I set the coffee table in the living room and turn on the fire, and I drink more wine and try Benton several more times. His phone instantly goes to voicemail. It’s now close to one a.m. I could call Machado, but I don’t want to ask him where my husband is. I could call Douglas Burke, but hell would have to freeze over first, and I turn off the stove. I sit in front of the gas fire with Shaw in my lap and Sock snuggled next to me, both of them sleeping, and I drink, and when I’ve drunk enough I call my niece.

  “Are you awake?” I ask, when Lucy answers.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “This is voicemail. How can I help you?” she says.

  “I know it’s late.” I hear someone in the background, or I think I do. “Is that your TV?”

  “What’s going on, Aunt Kay?” She’s not alone, and she’s not going to tell me.

  twenty-seven

  I WAKE UP WITHOUT THE ALARM AND FOR AN INSTANT don’t know where I am or who’s in bed with me. Moving my hand under the covers, I feel Benton’s warm slender wrist and tapered fingers, and I go hollow inside as I feel what I was feeling in my dream. It was Luke I was with.

  A dream so vivid, sensations linger where his hands and mouth had been, nerves alive and wanting, and I slide close to Benton and stroke the lean muscles of his bare chest and belly, and when I have roused him we do what we want and we don’t talk.

  When nothing is left we shower and start again, hot water coming down hard, and he is hard, almost angry, our lust the way it was when we cheated and lied, desperate to satisfy what raged beneath our outward calm, and relief never lasted long. We could not stay away from each other and could not get enough, and I want it back.

  “Where have you been?” I say into his mouth, and he moves me against the wet tile wall, and water is loud, and I ask him again.

  He tells me he’s here without saying it, and I’m here and belong to him and there can be no denying it. We make love the way we did when it was wrong, when he had a wife he was unhappy with and daughters who had little use for him, and then for a long time he was gone.

  He was nowhere and back, with me but not, and Marino made it worse, and touching felt different after that. Nothing was the same until betrayal and jealousy reset us like a bone mending badly that needed to be broken again. We had to hurt.

  “Stay this time,” I say into his mouth, steamy water pouring over us. “Stay this time, Benton.”

  When we are dressing he asks me what I was dreaming.

  “What makes you think I dreamed anything?” I go through suits hanging in my closet, and it reminds me of looking through Peggy Stanton’s clothes.

  “Doesn’t matter.” He stands in front of the full-length mirror, tying his tie.

  “It matters or you wouldn’t ask.”

  “Dreams are dreams unless they become something else.” He watches my reflection as I decide on unstylish pants and a sweater and practical ankle boots that are warm.

  It will be a long day, hopefully not as long as yesterday, but I’m going to be comfortable in corduroys and a cable-knit cardigan, and it’s very cold, the temperature below freezing.

  Ice has formed on bare trees and evergreens, as if they’ve been varnished or glazed with sugar, and as I move the shade to see the street below and imagine what driving might be like, Benton walks across hardwood and the rug and puts his arms around me and kisses my neck.

  His hands rediscover what was all his moments ago, and he pushes under everything I’ve just put on.

  “Don’t forget,” he says.

  “I’ve never forgotten.”

  “Lately you’ve forgotten. Yesterday you did.”

  “Go ahead and say it.” I want him to say what he saw, to just go ahead and say it.

  His hands are where he wants them.

  “Did you?” he asks.

  “Did I what?” I’m not going to make it easy for him. “You need to ask me what you want to know.”

  “Did you tell him you would? Did you let him think you would?”

  “I told him I wouldn’t.”

  “He was touching you,” Benton says, as he touches me. “He thought you would. That you wanted it.”

  “I told him I wouldn’t, and that’s the end of it,” I reply, and he moves me back to the bed.

  “Is it really all there is? Has there been anything more?”

  “There is not
hing more than that.” I unbuckle his belt.

  “Because if there’s more, I might kill him. I will, in fact, and get away with it.”

  “You won’t.” I unzip his pants. “And you can’t get away with it.”

  “I wanted to kill him in Vienna because I knew it then.”

  “There’s nothing to know. There’s nothing more than you already know,” I reply, and I ask about her. “You’re going to wrinkle your shirt.” I ask about Douglas Burke. “I’m going to wrinkle it. I’m going to ruin it.”

  White cotton and dark silk are smooth against my bare skin, and I ask him again, and then I don’t ask him anything else until we are in the kitchen and I’m feeding the dog and the cat.

  “Shaw certainly seems to have made herself at home.” I spoon her food on a plate and set it on a mat near the pantry door. “It’s as if she’s always lived here, but I think it’s a good idea to shut her in the guest room, in a confined space, until she’s really familiar with the house. Although I have a feeling Bryce is going to want her. He’ll take one look at her and that will be that.”

  “She should be checked by the vet.” Benton pours coffee, and he’s tall and straight in a dark suit, his silver hair damp and combed straight back.

  He doesn’t answer me about Douglas Burke.

  “I’ll send Bryce to get her at some point today, get her checked from stem to stern.” I open a can of dog food. “Are you coming by my office to see what we find with the car?”

  “I have to deal with the Marino problem.”

  “You’ll talk to him?”

  “Talking to him doesn’t help anything. He’s been talked to enough, and there’s nothing else. And nothing happened, Kay,” Benton then says, and he’s referring to something else entirely. “Nothing happened, but not because of her. But because of me.”