The Bone Bed

by Patricia Cornwell

  He lets me know that Douglas Burke is attracted to him and has tried to do something about it. She might be in love with him, and when he says that, I know she is. I know she has it bad.

  “That could be part of the problem.” He sips coffee and looks at me as I set Sock’s bowl on his mat, which is a safe distance from Shaw’s mat, although the two of them seem at peace with each other, as if they know what they’ve been through and wouldn’t deny any creature the courtesy of rescue.

  “What do you mean, ‘could be’?”

  “When we first started working together I really thought she was gay. So it’s been very confusing.” He hands me a coffee.

  “How did you suddenly become so obtuse? What is it you do for a living? Suddenly you’re a blockhead?”

  He smiles. “Not so astute when it comes to myself, maybe. I’m always the last to know.”

  “Bullshit, Benton.”

  “Maybe I didn’t want to know.”

  “That’s the more likely story.”

  “I would have bet you money she was gay.”

  “Whatever she is, she shouldn’t have done what she did last night.”

  “She knows that, Kay. And as bad as it was for you, it’s pretty terrible to be an FBI agent and lose control like that. She’s lost control. She has. Badly. And it will have to be addressed beyond my giving her hell about it.”

  “You don’t want her.” I give him another chance to confess.

  “I don’t want her like that, and in fact I was sure she wanted Lucy. She’d get unbelievably flustered around Lucy,” he says.

  “Lucy could fluster Mother Teresa.”

  “No, I mean it.” Benton opens the refrigerator and retrieves a jug of blood-orange juice and pours each of us a glass. “I’m trying to think of the last time when it was so obvious I was almost embarrassed. Doug was dropping me off at Hanscom, where Lucy was meeting me. She’d just shut down the helicopter and was walking across the tarmac, and Doug was so distracted I thought she might hit a parked plane.”

  “When Lucy flew you to New York this past June, right before my birthday,” I recall. “That recently you didn’t get what was going on?”

  “Her face was flushed, her hands were shaking, agitated, and she stared holes in her.”

  “Sounds like Sudafed, or whatever else she’s on.”

  “Now I’m wondering,” he says. “Now I’m really wondering.”

  “It could be Lucy, too. She might have been reacting to Lucy,” I consider, as I get eggs from the refrigerator and begin cracking them in a bowl. “People aren’t always one thing. Almost never, if they’re honest about it. I’m not aware they really know each other, beyond Lucy making a point to avoid her and every other FBI agent if possible.”

  “Could be something conflicted there.” Benton refills his cup and checks mine. “She’s asked me about her.”

  “She’s asked you about Lucy?”

  “She’s curious about Lucy’s FBI past. Why she left the Bureau. Why she left ATF.”

  “What did you tell her?” I turn on the stovetop.

  “Nothing.”

  “She’s just curious, or are her questions an attempt to be critical? Maybe she wants to find out information that might make her feel superior to Lucy.”

  “Doug’s competitive.”

  “You probably don’t know the half of it.” I open a cabinet, deciding on cookware.

  “I don’t talk about us, don’t confide in her, never have and wouldn’t.”

  “I’m not surprised. You barely confide in me.”

  “I know Doug takes all sorts of stuff, has real problems with allergies, but I’d never really given it a second thought.”

  “Have you seen symptoms and behavior like this from the beginning?” I whisk eggs and melt butter in a saucepan. “What about when you first started working with her closely?”

  “On and off and then on. These past few months? On all the time. Revved up like an overspeeding engine.” He drops English muffins in the toaster. “I thought it was her mood, her problem.”

  “Her problem with you. There should be chopped asparagus and fresh basil on the top shelf. Refrigerator one. Fig preserves are in the door of refrigerator two.” I am overly diligent about having plenty of food in the house.

  If I have a compulsion, it’s making sure I don’t run out of anything I might need for cooking, especially if the weather is taking a turn for the worse.

  “When I finally realized what she felt, by then it was pretty bad, and I attributed it to her being anxious, stressed, when she was around me.” He sets the jar of preserves, the basil, and the asparagus on the counter near me. “Cheese?”

  “Parmesan is already grated. And you’re in charge of the preserves.” I slide the jar back in his direction. “It will be good on the muffins.”

  I need to get to the store today. There probably won’t be time. I uncover Parmigiano-Reggiano I grated late last night and asparagus I chopped while I was waiting for Benton to come home. I whisk the eggs, adding salt and pepper.

  “Pseudoephedrine is structurally similar to amphetamine and has been used for performance enhancement.” I tear the basil leaves and mix them in. “It’s commonly abused by athletes, for example, causing euphoria, boundless energy, and people can get dependent, taking it three or four times a day or even more. Some use it to lose weight because it’s an appetite suppressant.”

  “She certainly doesn’t need to lose weight.”

  “Maybe that’s why.”

  “I’m suggesting she request a transfer to a different field office.”

  “You suggested it or you’re going to suggest it?” I turn the heat down very low. “And how did the moment of enlightenment happen after you’d gone all this time supposedly assuming she’s gay?”

  “When we went to Quantico together in August.” He checks the muffins and presses the levers back down. “She wanted to come into my room, and it became quite apparent what her interest was, and I made it very clear it wasn’t going to happen.”

  “And last night?” I open the oven door to make sure the broiler is heating up. “When she dropped you off to pick up your car and you didn’t get home until some two hours later? By which time I’d gone through half a bottle of wine by myself and dinner was ruined.”

  “We sat in your parking lot talking,” he says, and I believe him. “She can’t get over it.”

  “She can’t get over you.”

  “I guess not. No.”

  “I guess even an FBI agent can have a personality disorder. Narcissist? Borderline? Sociopath, or a little dash or all three? What is she? Because I know you know.”

  “I don’t expect you to feel sorry for her, Kay.”

  “Good.” I grab potholders. “Because I don’t.”

  I lift the stainless-steel saucepan off the induction stovetop and place it inside the oven on the top shelf.

  “This will take all of ten seconds, and I’m quite sure the muffins must be done,” I say. “She tries to seduce my husband, wants Marino to go to jail and basically accuses me of being a liar and resorts to interrogation methods reminiscent of rubber hoses.”

  “She probably needs a leave of absence.”

  “It was her intention to degrade if not annihilate the competition.”

  “She probably needs to see someone.” He pops up the muffins and quickly drops them on a plate and butters them. “She needs to be away from Boston and, quite frankly, away from me. I need her away from me.”

  Lightly brown on top, the frittata is done, and I slide it out of the saucepan and onto a platter and slice it like pizza while Benton continues telling me his concerns about Douglas Burke.

  “The problem is, you seek counseling, especially if you need to be on meds, it’s not just your own private business.” He carries our coffees and silverware to the breakfast table by the window. “With the Bureau, nothing is just your own private business. So she doesn’t want help even though she needs it.”


  “Are you worried she might be a danger to herself?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If you don’t know, that’s the same as saying yes.” I pull out a chair, and the morning beyond the window is getting light and a car going by on the street is moving slowly, carefully, because of ice. “If you don’t know if she’s safe for herself or maybe others, then you have to assume she isn’t. What do you do about that?”

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to talk to Jim.”

  Jim Demar is the special agent in charge of the Boston Field Office.

  “Unfortunately, it will give a life to something.” He spreads fig preserves on half a muffin, which he offers to me. “She could be put on administrative leave with pay, which wouldn’t be the worst thing if it gives her time to get her head straight, maybe get her moved and let her start fresh.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m going to recommend Louisville, Kentucky, where she’s from. A new office there, a great facility and lots of opportunity. Maybe the Joint Terrorism Task Force or the Intelligence Fusion Center or foreign counterintelligence or public corruption.”

  “Whatever gets her mind off of you,” I reply.

  “I’m sure she’ll be fine. It’s just not a good fit for her around here.”

  • • •

  I think about that as I drive back to the CFC, not a good fit, and yet Douglas Burke’s problem has nothing to do with Boston and everything to do with Benton. He’s being naïve, and it concerns me, and I contemplate how strange it might seem to almost anyone that my husband the profiler can be thick, downright dense. I’ve never been in this exact predicament. I’ve never had to deal with someone obsessed with my husband quite to this degree, and he doesn’t see it the way I do. Douglas Burke is dangerous to herself and I’m not sure to whom else.

  twenty-eight

  I PULL IN BEHIND MY BUILDING AND CAN DETERMINE BY the cars in the lot the key people who are here, the ones I will need. Luke and Anne, and Ernie, George and Cybil, and I notice Toby’s pickup truck. He’s on call tonight and is supposed to be off today. His red Tacoma is parked in an Investigation space next to the white Tahoe I was in yesterday, and I think of what Lucy said when we talked at one a.m.

  She told me the reason she was still up at that hour, as if it required an explanation, is that she and Marino had been arguing rather fiercely. He refused to stay in her house and she refused to drive him to the CFC to get his car, and she wouldn’t drive him to his home in Cambridge, either. From that I inferred he’d been drinking or wasn’t to be trusted for one reason or another, and as she was telling me this I could hear someone in the background who wasn’t him.

  The person was speaking in a low, quiet voice I couldn’t make out while Lucy went on to say that Marino finally agreed to stay in the stable, an outbuilding that really isn’t a stable anymore because she’s converted it into a washing and detailing bay with an underground firing range. Upstairs on the second floor is a guest quarters, an efficiency apartment, and she was moving about as she described this, and I couldn’t hear the other person anymore, and that probably was deliberate.

  It’s been a while since I’ve been invited to Lucy’s country home, as she calls her sixty-some acres on the Sudbury River west of Boston, a horse farm she’s spent the past year renovating and retrofitting to handle her collection of gravity-defying machines, the barn converted into a monster garage, the paddock now a concrete helipad. Marino is reasonably okay, and I shouldn’t be worried, Lucy informed me, and the last time I knew she was dating anyone was in early summer, a person she rendezvoused with in Provincetown more than once.

  Of course Marino’s upset. He’s angry, Lucy explained, and I couldn’t stop thinking of the gold signet ring she had on yesterday. I didn’t question her. I know when not to, but she seemed so uneasy and guarded, and it occurred to me that whatever she and Marino were fighting about may have nothing to do with the mess he’s in. Maybe he moved into the stable because of who she’s with, someone she doesn’t want to talk about, someone Marino doesn’t approve of, and he’s never hesitated to give Lucy his opinion about choices she’s made.

  The CFC seems lonely, Marino’s absence a void that is palpable, and I enter my building through the bay. I don’t see Lucy’s car, whatever she’s decided to drive today, but by now she’s on her way here to help me with what I’ve asked. How to track an imposter on Twitter, and is it possible the person who sent me the video clip and image of a severed ear also pretended to be Peggy Stanton and tweeted Marino? It would seem unlikely, were it not for the timing, everything horrid happening all at once.

  I unlock the door to the autopsy floor, pausing at the security desk to check the log. Five cases have come in since late last night, two possible drug ODs, a gunshot homicide, a sudden unexpected death in a parking lot, a pedestrian hit-and-run, the autopsies already under way. I told Luke to start without me and to make sure we discuss Howard Roth at some point. I want to review scene photographs, to examine his clothing and take a look at his body before it’s released. I want as much history as we can find because I don’t believe he got a flail chest from falling down his basement steps.

  Through another door I go down a ramp, the evidence bay a walled-off windowless space where my staff are working, all of them in white Tyvek and face shields. They are covered from their scalps to the soles of their feet by the same water- and bacteria-proof flashspun polyethylene barrier used to wrap houses and commercial buildings and boats and cars and mail. Faces behind plastic and cocooned in a sheen of white, scarcely recognizable as people I know, barely people at all, making synthetic crinkly sounds as they move around.

  They are setting up cyanoacrylate evaporators with fans and humidifiers around the 1995 pale yellow Mercedes sedan, its doors and trunk open wide, in an area of the bay where the lights have been dimmed. Trace evidence examiner Ernie Koppel has on orange goggles and is using the ALS on the driver’s seat, and I suit up and put on gloves. I ask him what’s been done so far.

  “I wanted to go through it with a fine-toothed comb before we fume it,” he says, and while the hood covers his baldness it plumps up his already plump cheeks, his teeth and nose seeming unnaturally large. “You might want to put these on if you’re going to look.” He hands me goggles the same way he always does, as if I don’t know to put them on when using wavelengths that require filters.

  Crouching by the open driver’s door, he moves the guide, what looks like a cone-shaped lamp attached to a black cord. He paints ultraviolet light over brown carpet that is stained and worn, and I wonder out loud if there might have been mats and someone removed them. Maybe the killer did when he returned the car to her garage, and I’m not the least bit hesitant about referring to a murderer even though I don’t know why Peggy Stanton is dead. I’ve already decided if toxicology turns up negative I will sign her out as a homicide with a cause of death that’s undetermined.

  “There were no mats front or back when the car was brought in,” Ernie says. “I can’t answer if there ever were any, but I have a feeling maybe not based on what I’m seeing.” He directs the light to show me. “Mostly in this area.” He means the driver’s side of the front seat.

  Fibers look like snippets of wire fluorescing white, orange, neon green, and rainbow blends as the UV light passes over them. Ernie reaches in with adhesive carbon tape stubs that he gives to me as he finishes with each one. I place them inside screw-cap vials, sealing them in bags I label with the location they were recovered from and other information Ernie gives to me.

  “I already went over the back and the passenger’s side.” His coveralls and booties make plastic sounds, and intermittently his voice is muffled when he’s inside the car. “First with white light, then blue, just in case there’s fine blood spatter or gunshot residue. I tried green for latents. UV for semen, saliva, urine. There’s no evidence thus far that anything bad happened in this car. It’s dusty and lonely, if a car can be lonely, like an old person’s
car.”

  “She wasn’t old, but I think she lived like it.”

  “I found what looks like some cat fur, grayish-white,” he says. “On the carpet in back where you might expect someone to put a pet carrier.”

  “I’m reasonably sure she had a cat.” I need to talk to Bryce about that, about taking Shaw to the vet.

  “It may have been her only passenger,” Ernie supposes. “Typical for what I see in a vehicle usually driven by one person, especially an older person. There’s a high concentration of fibers, hair, other debris transferred to the driver’s area and tracked in and ground into the carpet, which I could cut out, but I’d rather collect what’s obvious first. What I am noticing and what you’ll be most interested in is this stuff here.”

  His gloved hand holds out another stub to me.

  “You’ll need a lens to see what I’m talking about,” he says. “It doesn’t fluoresce because it’s absorbing the UV and looks black, pretty much like blood does, but it’s not blood. In normal light and under a lens it’s dark red. There’s a fair amount of it in the carpet near the brake and the accelerator, like someone had it on his shoes.”

  I step away from the car and take off my goggles. Retrieving a magnifier from a cart, I examine the stub and agree with Ernie that blood wouldn’t look like this. The woody material is familiar.

  “I’m thinking the stuff could be mulch,” he says.

  “Do you know what kind of wood?”

  “The chemical spectra for that may take a day or two. Assuming you want to know if all of it came from the same localized area, from the same tree, for example?”

  George and Cybil from trace want to know when they can begin to set up the tent. It will completely enclose the car so no one is inhaling superglue fumes or is exposed to them. I tell them not quite yet.

  “To determine that degree of specificity? Well, it depends on the uptake from soil, various elements in it; we are what we eat. It’s true of everything, even trees,” Ernie is saying from inside the Mercedes, and I know he’s thinking about what I recovered from Peggy Stanton’s body.