The Bone Bed

by Patricia Cornwell

  Maybe his buddy Jerry who works maintenance at the nursing home was keeping Roth well stocked, or maybe Roth was taking the bags when he was in and out, still working the occasional odd job there. I remind Machado that we must find out if Peggy Stanton volunteered at Fayth House.

  “A careful, cautious woman who had an alarm system and didn’t want her address and phone number on her checks wasn’t going to let just anybody in her home.” I collect the open carton of liners. “She must have had some connection with him; she must have felt safe with him if she let him do any sort of work inside her house or even on her property.”

  “Unless whoever killed this guy planted the check in his toolbox as an alibi.” Machado takes another evidence bag from me.

  “Why?” I wander back to the TV.

  “We find it and assume Howie killed her. Case solved. Sort of like the way he set up Marino, right? It’s what this son of a bitch does, right?”

  I don’t believe he’s right at all, but I listen to him spin his theory as I let him know I’m untying the garbage bag under the counter because it’s peculiar that it’s the only one closed. All the other ones are open, and maybe Howard Roth left them that way because he rinsed out all the bottles and cans and jars and left the bags open so everything would dry.

  I point out to Machado that there’s a garden hose outside, and most redemption facilities require recyclables to be emptied and rinsed, and I also haven’t noticed any odors. I tell him that if he doesn’t object I’m going to see what’s in this one bag and then I’m going to look for blood.

  “Thing is, we find the check and bingo.” Machado continues to describe what I don’t think is possible. “Some lowlife who killed Peggy Stanton. Her handyman did it and then died in a drunken accident. The killer sets that up and we think case closed.”

  “And where does the killer think we’ll assume Roth kept the body after he supposedly murdered her?” I inquire, as I untwist the tie. “Where might he have kept it long enough for it to begin to mummify? Certainly not in this house over the summer, and are we supposed to believe Howard Roth had a boat or access to one?”

  “Maybe the killer assumed she wouldn’t look mummified,” Machado says. “Maybe he thought she wouldn’t look dehydrated after she was in the water for a while.”

  “Mummified remains don’t reconstitute like freeze-dried fruit. You can’t add moisture back to a dead body.”

  I open the bag, and the bottle is right on top of other bottles and cans and jars. It’s right there where the monster placed it.

  “But would the average person know that a dried-out body wouldn’t rehydrate?” Machado asks.

  The forty-ounce Steel Reserve 211 bottle is the same as the two empties by the recliner, each with a price sticker from a Shop Quik.

  “I’m not going to do anything with this here,” I say to Machado, as I hold up the bottle in my gloved hands, turning it in sunlight shining through a window. “I see ridge detail, and I see blood.”

  thirty-three

  I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY A KILLER WHO HAS ELABORATE fantasies and premeditates and seems meticulous makes so little effort to hide evidence that matters. In fact, I’m baffled, I tell Benton.

  “You’ve got to focus on his priorities,” he says, as he drives us through mid-Cambridge. “You have to get inside his head and know what he values. Neatness, tidiness, everything exactly the way he likes it. Restoring order after he kills. Showing he’s a nice guy, a decent guy, someone civilized. I’m suspicious the flowers in Peggy Stanton’s house were from him. When he returned her car and entered her house he left flowers to show what a sterling fellow he is.”

  “Any luck finding a record of a delivery?”

  “Not any of the florists in the area. It’s been checked.” He glances at his phone, and he’s been glancing at it a lot. “I think there was no card because there never was one, that he walked in with a spring arrangement like a thoughtful son stopping by to see his mother. It’s very important to this person that what he believes about himself is reasserted after he’s killed. A great guy. A gentleman. Someone capable of meaningful relationships.”

  “What he did to Howard Roth wasn’t exactly gentlemanly, and he certainly didn’t leave him flowers.”

  “Howard Roth had no value.” Benton glances at another text message, and I wonder if it is Douglas Burke who is writing to him every other minute. “He was an object no better than the trash he dug through, and the killer assumed you wouldn’t value him, either. He assumed it would be a case that wouldn’t merit your attention.”

  “Me specifically?”

  “What it tells me is whoever he is, he doesn’t know you personally. I retract what I said earlier about my worrying he knows you, knows Marino. He knows about you, about your office, but he doesn’t know you,” Benton says, as if there can be no doubt about it. “He’s getting it wrong. He’s making mistakes. Maybe you could text Bryce to let them know we’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  It’s almost three p.m., and we’re going to be late for a meeting Benton scheduled in my TelePresence conference room, and I’m not happy that Douglas Burke has been included. I thought Benton made it perfectly clear that they couldn’t work together anymore.

  “He stages his crimes in a premeditated and precise way, he’s obsessed with games that include framing people, and then is careless about fingerprints and blood?” I worry again that something might have gone on with Benton and Burke.

  “He has reason to believe such evidence isn’t incriminating to him,” he says, as we go back to the CFC the way we came, following the river, and the water is dusky, the sky a pale blue haze. “For one thing, he probably assumed it wouldn’t be found. He didn’t think you’d look. That’s the important part, Kay. He didn’t assume you’d bother with anything you’ve bothered with. He doesn’t know you, not in the least,” he says that again.

  Douglas Burke will be waiting in my conference room, and I’m not sure what I’ll do when I see her.

  “There’s ridge detail all over the bottle,” I reply. “I didn’t even need dusting powder or an ALS to see that there’s enough minutiae for an identification.”

  “But we don’t know whose identification.” Benton glances at his phone in his lap, at whatever’s just landed. “Could be Roth’s prints on there. Most likely he bought the malt liquor and drank it.”

  “The important point is the killer didn’t even bother wiping off the bottle, which is really careless,” I repeat. “The smartest thing would have been to take it with him and toss it somewhere it would never be found.”

  “Disposing of the weapon in a bag full of bottles and cans that Roth collected shows the killer’s complete disregard for his victim, his utter indifference.” Benton glances down at his phone again. “Roth was nothing to him, nothing more than an inconvenience, and the killer assumes everybody would feel that way because he doesn’t know how to feel any other way. He can’t project values onto you or anyone that he doesn’t have.”

  “Onto me specifically?”

  “Yes, onto you, Kay. He doesn’t know you.” Benton drums that in. “He can’t imagine what you’ll do or how you feel because he’s incapable of empathy. Therefore, he reads people wrong.”

  “We’ll see about the print on Peggy Stanton’s rearview mirror, if it matches anything on the bottle.” I think out loud as I worry, and I don’t want to worry.

  I want to trust Benton. I want to believe every word he’s told me.

  “Maybe he left a print on her mirror but no hit in AFIS.” Benton scrolls through messages. “He’s not in the system. He’s someone no one would suspect. He’s never been arrested and has no reason for his prints to be in a database. He’s quite comfortable he’ll never be a suspect, and you’ve caused a problem he’s not expected. The question is whether he knows it by now.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t look at that thing when you drive.” I take his phone from him. “If you do it when I’m with you, what do you do when
I’m not?”

  “Nobody you need to worry about, Kay.” He holds out his hand. “I don’t do anything when you’re not with me that you need to worry about.”

  “I thought you talked to her.” I return his phone.

  “She’s not leaving Marino alone. Probably the biggest reason to have this meeting.”

  “But she’ll lay off him when she hears what we know,” I assume, because Burke certainly should.

  “It’s ridiculous,” he says. “Marino’s prints, like yours, like mine, are on file for exclusionary purposes, and it’s not his fingerprint on Peggy Stanton’s rearview mirror. And he sure as hell didn’t murder Howard Roth. Marino was in Tampa when Roth was killed. The meeting will put an end to it.”

  “He probably still thinks we believe it was an accident.” I’m not thinking about Marino but the person Burke should be looking for.

  I’m thinking about the killer.

  “Unless he’s been following us,” I add. “In that case, he might know what we do. If he’s cruising around, watching us.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s not nervous,” Benton says. “This person is confident and never imagines he’s making mistakes. He never imagined you’d spray everything with chemicals, that you’d find blood he didn’t bother to clean up.”

  “He couldn’t have cleaned it up,” I reply. “Not all of it.”

  It wasn’t apparent to the unaided eye, a medium-velocity impact spatter I associate with blunt force. Varying sizes of elongated drops were on the left side of the recliner, on the brown vinyl armrest, and on the dark brown paneled wall left of where I believe Howard Roth’s head was when he was struck hard enough to lacerate his scalp and fracture his skull.

  The bloodstain pattern that glowed violet for me told the heartless story of him asleep or passed out drunk in front of the TV when a murderer walked in a door that apparently was never locked. Roth was struck once in the back of the head with a malt liquor bottle that the killer placed inside a trash bag he closed with a twist tie.

  Bloody streaks and swipes on dirty stained dark carpet and bloody drag marks soaked into the pile led from the living room to the basement door, and then blood was plainly visible where one would expect it to be if he were an accidental death. Drips and smears were on the six concrete steps leading to the basement, his unconscious body pushed down the stairs and then kicked and stomped where it landed. The killer made sure Roth wouldn’t survive and assumed no one would entertain the possibility he was a homicide, that it would never enter our minds.

  “He did make some effort to disguise what he’s done,” Benton points out, as we pass the boathouse, the old Polaroid building again. “He could have just showed up late at night and shot him, stabbed him, strangled him, but that would have been obvious. He got some of it right but not the rest of it, because he’s unable to anticipate what normal people do.”

  “He can’t imagine any of us caring.”

  “That’s right. Someone empty, hollow. He’s probably seen him around here.”

  Benton suspects the killer has noticed Roth in Cambridge, has been aware of him for months, observing the handyman wandering about looking for work and digging through trash cans and recycle bins, sometimes pushing a grocery cart. This killer is aware of everyone when he’s stalking his next victim, Benton says. He prowls, cruises, researches, observing patterns and calculating. He does dry runs, feeding his cruel fantasies.

  But that doesn’t mean he knew who Howard Roth was by name. The killer forged a hundred-dollar check that he likely sent in the mail as he continued to pay Peggy Stanton’s bills long after she was dead. But that doesn’t mean he had a clue that the Howard Roth whose check he wrote was the homeless-looking man he saw rooting through the trash in Cambridge.

  “What I’m sure of is he killed Roth when he did for a reason,” Benton says. “This was an expedient homicide devoid of emotion.”

  “Stomping and kicking him seems rather emotional.”

  “It wasn’t personal,” Benton replies. “He felt nothing.”

  “It could be construed as angry. In most stomping cases, there’s rage,” I reply.

  “He felt he needed to get it done. Like killing a bug. I’m wondering if he’d been to her house recently, if Roth had.” Benton’s looking down at his phone again. “Maybe wanting his money, and it was bad timing.”

  “If the killer happened to be stealing Peggy Stanton’s mail when Roth appeared, that would be bad timing, couldn’t be worse timing.” My building is in sight. “But I wouldn’t expect him to do that during daylight.”

  “We don’t know that Roth only went out during daylight. There are all-night markets all around where Peggy Stanton lived, a lot of them on Cambridge Street, a Shop Quik that’s open twenty-four-seven just around the corner from her,” Benton says. “He was going to go out no matter the hour if he ran out of beer, and he might have frequented her neighborhood because he wanted his money.”

  “After dark on a poorly lit street?” I reply. “Chances are Roth wouldn’t have gotten a good look at him, even if they were face-to-face.”

  “He felt he had reason, a need to play it safe.” Benton says the killer did. “He had reason enough to take the risk of following him home with the intention of murdering him.”

  We turn off Memorial Drive, and I imagine Howard Roth on his way to or from the Shop Quik. If he’d seen someone getting mail out of Peggy Stanton’s box he might have spoken to this person, inquired where she is or when she might be home and even explain why he was asking. A disabled vet, an alcoholic who goes through trash cans and recyclables, a part-time handyman described as harmless. Even if he looked the killer in the face, why was murdering Roth a chance worth taking?

  I wonder if the killer had some other reason for being familiar with Howard Roth, if they’d seen each other before. They may not have known each other by name but by sight, by context.

  “And the rest was easy,” Benton is saying, as we stop at the CFC gate, and my phone begins to ring.

  Bryce.

  “Follow a drunk home who doesn’t lock his door.” Benton reaches up to press the remote clipped to the visor.

  What does Bryce want that can’t wait until I’m inside? He knows I’m here. He can see us in the monitor on his desk, in almost any monitor in any area of the building, and I press answer.

  “Watch and wait.” Benton drives in. “Let him go through a few quarts and pass out in his chair. He probably never knew what hit him.”

  “I’m pulling in now,” I say to my chief of staff.

  “Oh my God, have I got news.” He’s so keyed up I have to turn my volume down.

  “There should be people waiting for us—” I start to say.

  “You were expecting them? Oh, Lord. I made them wait in the lobby.”

  “You what?”

  “Love, love the cat. Little Shaw’s in perfect cat health.” He says purrfect. “Okay, hold on, I’m calling Ron now, gonna get him on his cell, sure am sorry. It would be helpful if you’d let me know things like this, for God’s sake. Ron? You can escort them up immediately. I didn’t know they were expected; no one tells me anything.

  “I certainly apologize, but if you would just inform me? I had no idea?” Bryce is back to me, and I can’t get in a word. “Well, Shaw almost got all A-pluses. A touch of dry skin, a little anemic, vet says it’s best she’s not left alone all the time, since she used to be with someone rather constantly until the bad thing happened, not to mention she’s been traumatized. And Ethan works out of his home office three days a week, and I think we should keep her, especially after the scare with Indy, who’s fine, thanks for asking—”

  “Bryce!” I interrupt him for the third time.

  “What!”

  “Why would you make the FBI wait in our lobby,” I ask. “Or have them escorted up by security?”

  “No. Oh, no, the two women agents? Not them. Oh, Lord, I didn’t realize . . . They
’re in the war room and not who I meant, oh, shit.” He sounds shocked. “Hold on, hold on, let me catch him. Ron! Don’t escort them up. You’re with them now? Oh, shit,” he says.

  thirty-four

  I FAULT HIM FOR NOT MAKING AN APPOINTMENT AND then showing up unannounced at the CFC, but I can’t say he has no right to talk to me. I decide that Channing Lott and his companions are to be brought upstairs.

  “Just give me a minute to get settled,” I instruct Bryce over my cell phone. “Take them into the break room, get them water, coffee. I can see them for a few minutes only. Please explain I’m late for a meeting. I’ll text you when I’m ready, and you can bring them to my office.”

  I push the elevator button for the seventh floor and know what Benton is going to insist on, but it’s out of the question.

  “Kay, I should be with you—” he begins, and I don’t let him finish.

  I shake my head. “It’s no more appropriate for you to sit in on whatever he wants to discuss than it would be if he were any family member, any other loved one of the deceased. He’s the husband of someone whose case is mine.”

  “Her body’s not been found. She’s not your case.”

  “I’ve been consulted about her, and he knows it. I’ve testified about her in his trial, and in his mind she’s my case. She has to be somebody’s case, for God’s sake, because it’s highly improbable she’s still alive. Let’s face it, she’s no more alive than Emma Shubert is.”

  “You can’t make that connection based on fact.” The way he says it is revealing.

  “I know when people aren’t going to walk through a door ever again, Benton.” I study him carefully. “Those women are dead.”

  He says nothing because he believes it, too. He knows more than he’s saying. I think of the meeting I’m about to be quite late for, but whatever is happening will have to wait.

  “What if Channing Lott really didn’t have anything to do with his wife’s disappearance and people like me won’t talk to him?” I ask.