The Bone Bed

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Is he on his back, his side, facedown?” I open a cabinet, looking for three-percent hydrogen peroxide.

  “On his back and left hip, kind of twisted in a heap,” she replies.

  I go to the computer and take a look. Howard Roth’s body is turned to one side on the basement floor at the bottom on the steps. He stares straight up, his knees drawn, his arms bent by his sides, and blood is coagulated and drying under the back of his neck, spreading to a stain that disappears under his shoulders. Once he landed in this position, I’m fairly sure he didn’t move.

  “It bothers me that it seems the sole reason Channing Lott became a suspect is an e-mail exchange between him and whoever he allegedly was attempting to hire,” Lucy says. “You’re aware of it, I assume?”

  “Not specifically.” I return to the cabinet and find jars of sodium acetate and 5-sulfosalicylic acid.

  “I’ll pull it up from online news,” she says, as she does it. “So this past March fourth, a Sunday? An e-mail was sent to Channing Lott’s personal account from a user he later claimed he didn’t recognize but assumed it was someone from one of his shipping offices. He said in direct testimony that he can’t possibly know the names of everyone who works for him around the world.”

  Lucy reads what’s quoted in the story.

  I realize it’s inappropriate for me to contact you directly through e-mail, but I must have verification of the partnership and the subsequent exchange before I proceed with the solution.

  “And what did Channing Lott reply?” I dissolve the sulfosalicylic acid into hydrogen peroxide.

  “He wrote, ‘Are we still committed to an award of one hundred thousand dollars?’”

  “Certainly sounds incriminating.” I check the reagent Leuco Crystal Violet, LCV, making sure it hasn’t turned yellow, that it’s white and fresh.

  “He claims he assumed the e-mail exchange was about a monetary prize his shipping company offers,” she reports. “That he often partners with other marine transport companies in rewarding scientists for coming up with viable solutions for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

  I pour in the LCV, a cationic triarylmethane dye, and mix with a magnetic stirrer.

  “The amount of the award was in fact one hundred thousand dollars,” Lucy says.

  “Sounds like an argument Jill Donoghue would come up with.” I transfer some of the solution into a spray bottle.

  “Except the Mildred Vivian Cipriano Award has existed for more than a decade,” Lucy says. “So it wasn’t just trumped up for his defense to explain away the e-mails. And since whoever initiated them has never been arrested or even identified, I conclude the e-mail sent to Lott wasn’t traceable. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?”

  “If you could go into that cabinet and get the D-Seventy.” I tell her which lens I want. “We’re going to try infrared to see if there are any bloody impressions we can enhance that aren’t going to show up any other way on black cotton.”

  We begin taking photographs using different filters and shutter speeds and distances. First we try without chemical enhancement, and on the front and back of the T-shirt and on the plaid boxer shorts are indistinct areas where a bloody residue was transferred to the fabric by something coming in contact with it. Then I spray the LCV and it reacts to the hemoglobin in blood, and I get discernible shapes, startling ones.

  Footwear images, the outsole, a heel, a toe, glow a vivid violet, the bloody shapes overlaying one another as someone repeatedly stomped and kicked Howard Roth’s chest, his sides, his abdomen, his groin, while he was on his back, probably while he was already down on the basement floor. He bled from a gash on his head, and he bled from his nose and mouth, frothy blood from shattered ribs puncturing lungs, and I try to imagine it.

  A man drunk and barely dressed, and I don’t believe he was in bed when his killer showed up. Most people don’t wear socks to bed, especially in warm weather, and I go through the scene and autopsy photographs again, and I’m not satisfied.

  I call Sil Machado.

  “Free as a bird” are the first words out of his mouth. “And Donoghue’s giving you all the credit.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “She says you reminded the jury, and rightly so, that it can’t be proven that Mildred Lott is dead, much less that her husband did it.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “What do you need?”

  I ask him to meet me at Howard Roth’s house as I pull off protective clothing in the anteroom, and the door leading into the corridor opens. Benton is here.

  “Give me about twenty minutes,” I tell Machado. “If you get there first it would be helpful if you wait outside.” I meet Benton’s eyes. “It appears Howard Roth had a visitor right before he died. The check you found in the toolbox? Have you submitted it?”

  “Latents has it,” Machado says. “And by the way, when they fumed the car they got a print from the rearview mirror. And it isn’t Peggy Stanton’s.”

  thirty-two

  BENTON DRIVES MY SUV WEST ALONG THE CHARLES, past the Art Deco former headquarters of Polaroid and the patinated copper-roofed DeWolfe Boathouse. It’s noon, and patchy ice has melted, sunlight sparkling on water and bright on the old Shell sign. We head toward Central Square while I return Ernie’s call.

  “Marine paint,” he says right off. “No big surprise, since the turtle obviously was in the water when he bumped into something or something bumped into him. An antifouling paint loaded with copper to retard the growth of barnacles, mussels, and so on. Also zinc, which would be consistent with primer.”

  “And consistent with the color,” I reply. “That yellowish-green brings to mind a zinc-based primer.”

  “Microscopically, you got more than one color,” he says. “In fact, you got three.”

  We cross Massachusetts Avenue, City Hall up ahead, Romanesque, with a bell tower and stone walls trimmed in granite, and Ernie explains that the traces of paint transferred to the barnacle and also to the broken end of the bamboo pole came from the bottom of a boat. Possibly the prop or an anchor or anchor chain that at one time, he says, probably a number of years ago, was painted black.

  “Often whatever is used to paint the bottom of a boat is also used on other areas that remain submerged when the boat is moored,” he adds.

  “A quick-and-dirty way of doing it,” I reply, as Benton turns at the YMCA. “Use the same paint on everything.”

  “Quick-and-dirty is what a lot of people do, and then there are those who don’t give a damn and are really sloppy and irresponsible,” Ernie says. “Whoever painted the boat you’re looking for falls into that category.”

  It doesn’t fit with what I think of him, a killer tidy and meticulous, who plots and plans in his malignant fantasyland.

  “The zinc-based primer went on top of the old paint, which wasn’t sanded off; someone couldn’t be bothered.” Ernie continues to describe what he found on a swipe of color almost invisible to the unaided eye.

  A boat this person uses for his evil but not for his leisure, not for his pleasure.

  “And over that a deep red coating with copper or cuprous oxide, which is usually used on wood,” he says. “I have a feeling the boat you’re looking for has a lot of chipped, peeled, or damaged red topcoat, some areas of exposed primer. In other words, something not well maintained at all.”

  An old boat in ill repair that probably isn’t registered in his name or docked where he lives or even near there.

  “If it were a prop, wouldn’t you have expected more damage to the turtle?” I ask.

  “If the prop was turning, yes. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe the person cut the engine while he did what he did.”

  Did what he did.

  Which was stopping the boat and shutting down the engine so he could push the dog crate, the boat fender, and the body overboard. I try to envision it and can’t imagine hoisting a crate containing more than a hundred and fifty pounds of cat litter, dropping it and a body over a high side
rail. A dive platform, a boat with an open transom, I consider. The cut-down transom of lobster boats around here that make it easier to launch pots and buoys, boats that are ubiquitous at all hours and in all types of weather, attracting no attention, and I try to reconstruct it.

  The open transom of an old wooden boat that’s been repainted, and the crate, the fender, the body pushed into the water at the same moment a gigantic leatherback became entangled with fishing tackle, with an old bamboo pole, is there. I see the strike, the encounter, I almost can. The turtle surfacing for air, dragging the fishing gear wound around him, and running into the bottom of a boat, perhaps glancing off its prop, and now he’s dangerously trussed up in yellow nylon buoy line, weighted down, slowing down, pulling his burden until it almost pulls him under.

  It’s quite likely the killer wasn’t aware of the leatherback, knew nothing of what occurred. For one thing, I suspect it was dark, and I imagine the boat near Logan, where the e-mail was sent from Emma Shubert’s iPhone on Sunday at six-twenty-nine p.m., and then this person waited, possibly for hours, until he was sure no one would see him.

  “What makes you say a number of years ago?” I ask Ernie. “You’re able to date when the hull originally was painted black?”

  “Traces of TBT,” he says.

  The paint contains tributyltin oxide, he explains, an antifouling biocide that has decimated marine life—shellfish, in particular—killing them off, causing them to mutate. TBT is one of the most toxic chemicals ever deliberately released into the world’s water and has been illegal in high-traffic areas such as harbors and bays since the late 1980s. But the ban unfortunately doesn’t include oil tankers and military vessels.

  “So unless the boat in question is military or a tanker, and I seriously doubt it, then the boat you’re looking for could be at least twenty years old,” he adds, as Benton looks for parking on the street near Machado’s Crown Vic.

  Howard Roth has no driveway, his small frame house overtaken by trees and shrubs behind an abandoned factory on Bigelow Street in an area that’s a mixture of historic homes and Harvard apartments and affordable housing. While I can’t see it from where we are, I know that Fayth House is but a few blocks west on Lee Street, an easy walk from here. I continue to wonder if Peggy Stanton might have volunteered there.

  “The important point for your purposes?” Ernie says in my wireless earpiece, as I get out of the SUV. “Whoever repainted the boat to be in compliance didn’t give a shit that there’s a reason for the ban.”

  I get scene cases out of the back.

  “Apparently, the person just slapped coats of primer and red paint on top of original black paint, which doesn’t stop the TBT from continuing to leach out and into the water,” Ernie adds, and I think about what Lucy just told me.

  Channing Lott’s shipping company offers a hundred-thousand-dollar award for solutions that help preserve the environment. I can’t imagine any of his tankers painted with a dangerous biocide or that any boat he might have would be, certainly not his yacht that he sometimes moors in the Boston Harbor.

  “It could be anything,” Benton says, after I tell him, and we’re climbing the weathered wooden front steps of Howard Roth’s three-room frame house, which doesn’t look as uncared for as it simply looks poor. “Any type of vessel or marine object originally painted with the antifouling stuff, from a buoy to a piling to a submarine. Then repainted.”

  “I doubt a submarine would be repainted red.” I notice a coiled garden hose connected to an outside faucet and wonder what Howard Roth used it for.

  There’s no grass, nothing to water, and he didn’t own a car.

  “More likely we’re talking about a boat bottom and maybe its prop that were repainted with primer, and then a red antifouling paint that’s environmentally safe and legal.” We put on gloves and shoe covers, and I open a rusting screen door.

  Sil Machado is waiting on a porch crowded with open black garbage bags overflowing with cans and bottles. Shopping carts are filled with bags, and more of them are stacked in the seats of a metal slat porch glider. I wonder how Howard Roth got his recyclables to a redemption center, and I ask Machado if he knows.

  “Nearest one’s on Webster Ave.” He unlocks the front door with a single key attached to an evidence tag. “I think his buddy from Fayth House used to give him rides. Jerry, the maintenance guy who found him.”

  He lets us in and stays outside because I intend to spray for blood if I don’t find any that’s visible, and there’s very little room inside. Machado explains through the open door that Roth’s friend, maybe his only friend, got a DUI and his license was suspended.

  “He told me on Sunday afternoon when I responded to the call that as soon as he got his license back he was going to help Howie haul all this in,” Machado says.

  “When might that have been?” Benton asks, and we’re just inside the door, covering our clothes. “When was he going to get his license reinstated and give him a ride?”

  “It was his first offense, so his license was revoked only for a year,” Machado says. “He has three months to go. He said he told Howie to stop collecting before the floor caved in, to hold off until he could drive him. But he went out every day, digging through trash anyway. Not sure what you get for this stuff. Maybe a couple bucks a bag, total? Enough for one quart of the shit he drank.”

  I crouch by an open scene case, getting out the spray bottle of LCV and the camera, scanning my surroundings before I do anything. The living room and kitchen are one open area separated by a Formica countertop, an old TV against one wall, a brown vinyl recliner parked in front of it, and that’s about the only place someone could sit.

  Bags of metal cans and glass and plastic bottles are piled on a sofa, on a small table and on its chairs, and I can understand Machado’s attitude when he first got here after the body was found. I know all too well what it’s like to walk into a death scene that is so overwhelmed by what obsessive unwell people collect or hoard or don’t bother throwing out that it’s like sifting through a landfill.

  “This isn’t just about the money.” Benton stands by the kitchen counter, looking, taking in every detail.

  “It’s sad,” I agree. “Maybe he started out collecting all this for whatever petty cash he could get, but then it became a compulsion.”

  “Another addiction.”

  “Addicted to digging through trash,” I reply, noticing all of the window shades are down, the shapes of bottles and cans showing behind the yellowed fabric as the light shines through.

  I ask Machado if the shades were just like this when he came here the first time. Were they down in every window and he tells me through the open door that they were, and I ask him about lamps or overhead lights. He replies that the only light on was the single lightbulb in the basement, and it’s probably still on, he adds, unless it’s burned out.

  “When you’re done,” he says, “I’m going to dust all the switches, swab them, if need be. I’ll go over anything someone might have touched.”

  “A good idea,” I reply, and I ask if it would be all right to open the shades, to get a little light in here.

  “Help yourself, Doc. I’ve got photographs of the way everything was,” he says. “So no problem if you need to change or move something.”

  The windowsills are lined with vintage bottles and pop-top cans that are collectibles, Coca-Cola, Sun Drop, Dr Pepper, and a mucilage glue and jar of paste that I remember from my childhood. Items tossed when someone cleaned out the attic, and I imagine Howard Roth rescuing them from the trash and placing them on display in his house like trophies, like treasure.

  “What about the TV? On or off when his body was found?” Benton stares into the carpeted hall that leads to the back of the house.

  “It was off when I got here,” Machado says, and I’m interested in the two forty-ounce Steel Reserve 211 malt liquor bottles and three screw caps on the floor by the recliner.

  I wonder how long they’ve been the
re.

  “What about when his friend got here? What’s his name? Jerry?” Benton opens the bathroom door.

  “According to his version of things? The front door was unlocked, and when Howie didn’t answer, he walked in and called out to him. Says it was about four in the afternoon.”

  “Sunday afternoon?” Benton steps into the doorway that leads to the basement.

  “Right. And I got here about four-fifteen.”

  “Did this guy Jerry have a reason to hurt anyone? Maybe they’re drinking cheap malt liquor together, maybe arguing, maybe something got out of control?”

  “Can’t imagine it,” Machado says from the front doorway. “But I got his prints, swabbed him for DNA. He couldn’t have been more cooperative, says Howie never locked his door. Jerry says he was used to just walking in.”

  The remote is on top of the TV, neatly placed exactly in the middle, and I suggest to Machado we might want to collect it. He sounds dubious but says that’s fine, and I package the remote as evidence and hand it through the doorway to him.

  “I’m just curious why you might think someone touched it,” he says, and Benton has walked down the hallway to the bedroom.

  “He may have been drinking beer in the recliner, in his underwear and socks, possibly with the TV on, and he fell asleep there.” I notice that one of the garbage bags tucked under the counter is twisted shut with a tie but none of the others are. “I’d like to look inside the kitchen cabinets, if you don’t have a problem with it.”

  Under the sink are nine boxes of commercial can liners, a hundred to a carton, heavy-grade and not inexpensive, and I wonder where Roth got them.

  “I don’t think he bought these.” I reach inside for an open box and pull out green plastic ties exactly like the one twisted around the bag under the counter.

  I suggest to Machado he may want to check with Fayth House and see what brand of industrial waste-can liners they stock. I tell him that a carton this size with bags of this quality can cost thirty or forty dollars, which is considerably more than what Roth was going to get for the recyclables he placed inside them.