The Bone Bed

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Your yacht?” I ask, because I can’t help it.

  If he in fact is charged with some other crime, I’ve just ensured I will be a witness, possibly for the defense again.

  “Was your yacht docked there the night she vanished?” I then ask, because I don’t care about Jill Donoghue.

  I care about the truth.

  “It wasn’t,” he answers. “It was spending the winter in Saint-Tropez. I usually don’t have it brought back to this area until May.”

  I open the door adjoining my office to Bryce’s and give him the envelope, telling him to e-mail copies of the security video to Lucy and me. I let him know that he can show our guests out, and Channing Lott gives me a card, engraved on creamy paper of heavy stock. He’s written his private telephone numbers on it.

  “Millie wouldn’t go with anyone, even if a gun was pointed at her head.” He pauses in the corridor, his eyes intensely locked on mine. “If someone tried to grab her in our backyard, she would have fought like hell. He’d have to shoot her on the spot right then and there.”

  thirty-five

  TOXICOLOGY IN PEGGY STANTON’S CASE IS LIKE SEARCHING for a needle in a haystack when the needle may not be a needle and the hay may not be hay. I can’t grab at straws and wildly guess. I can’t demand every special drug screen imaginable without running out of samples and Phillis Jobe running out of patience.

  “An ordeal, I admit,” I say to my chief toxicologist over the phone. “I’m asking a lot and offering very little, I know.”

  Frozen sections of liver, kidney, and brain are in poor condition that will only worsen and be consumed with each test we run. I don’t have urine or vitreous fluid. I don’t have a single tube of blood.

  “It’s like pulling a sword from a stone, but I believe it can be done.” I’m at my desk inside my office, where the doors are shut as I explore possibilities with confidence I didn’t feel before. “I believe we’ve got a chance if we try a very practical approach.”

  New insights about Mildred Lott combined with what I know about Peggy Stanton lead in a more obvious direction, which I suspect strongly is the same direction for each victim, whether it is two or three or, God forbid, more. If what Benton has projected is true and the killer is murdering the same woman every time, perhaps his mother or some other powerful female figure, then he likely picks the same type of woman, at least symbolically, and chooses the same way of overpowering her.

  “No possible injection sites you found when you posted her?” Phillis gets to that.

  “None we could see,” I reply. “Her skin wasn’t in great condition, but we went over her very carefully with injection sites in mind, with any injury in mind. What seems probable if not evident at this point is she was last home on the early Friday evening of April twenty-seventh, fed her cat, unset and reset her alarm system at about six p.m., when she headed out with her pocketbook and keys. Most likely she drove off in her Mercedes and had an encounter that ended in a place where she was held hostage and killed. Possibly the same place where her body was frozen or kept in cold storage until she was weighted down and dumped in the bay as recently as yesterday or the night before.”

  “If the same person killed Mildred Lott, I wonder why her body’s not been found,” Phillis says.

  “Not found yet.” I know what Benton’s opinion is, that the killer keeps the bodies because he doesn’t want to give them up. “Part of the fantasy may be the aftermath, not letting them go, continuing some bizarre relationship he has with them,” I explain.

  “Necrophilia?”

  “No evidence with Peggy Stanton, but I can’t absolutely rule it out. Although I doubt it, to be honest. But if Mildred Lott was his first victim, his attachment to whatever she symbolized, his fantasy, in her case likely is stronger. She may be more personal to him, but that doesn’t mean his interest is overtly sexual. Benton thinks it’s about degrading, about power, about destruction.”

  “She disappeared about six weeks before this one did.” Before Peggy Stanton did, Phillis means. “Any other missing women we know of who might be even earlier?”

  “There are always missing people. But no similar case comes to mind. If Mildred Lott was his first, he likely has stronger feelings and fantasies about her,” I repeat emphatically, because I believe she is the key. “She might represent something different to him, a bigger prize.”

  “A billionaire’s socialite wife is a pretty big prize.”

  “That might not be why she would be a bigger prize to him. Her status and wealth may have nothing to do with why he targeted her. More likely it has to do with what she represented and what that triggered in him,” I answer, and I should be concerned about the FBI in my conference room and how late I’m going to be.

  But I have other troubling matters on my mind. Murdering Howard Roth may have been expedient, as Benton described. But it also was poor judgment. It was impulsive. It probably wasn’t necessary, and I fear it is a harbinger of things to come. If someone crosses the killer’s path, that person may be next.

  “But if Mildred Lott was his first victim, I can’t help but feel that she’s important to him, that he has a stronger attachment to her,” I say. “Which might be why her body hasn’t been found. He may still have it.”

  “Possibly a drug he slipped into their food or drink,” Phillis considers. “Saying she met her killer in a restaurant or some public place.” She’s talking about Peggy Stanton. “Maybe someone she met on the Internet, on Craigslist, Facebook, Google Plus. On one of those dating sites, what I’m constantly telling my kids not to do, for God’s sake.”

  “I really doubt it,” I reply. “I can’t imagine Peggy Stanton, or Mildred Lott, for that matter, hooking up with strangers on the Internet, and there’s no evidence they did. But to be safe we should screen for Rohypnol, gamma-hydroxybutyrate, ketamine hydrochloride.” I go through the list of date-rape drugs, despite my conviction that the killer has an MO, a method of operation, that he repeats, and it doesn’t include having a date or even a social encounter with whoever is on his violent radar.

  Mildred Lott was a dominant, assertive, yet extremely cautious woman who was quite tall and worked out diligently in the gym. She would not have made it easy for someone to take her anywhere she did not want to go, and her husband was adamant that if anyone tried to harm her, she would resist.

  After listening to what he said about his wife and knowing what I do about Peggy Stanton, I’m convinced the killer finds a way to incapacitate his victims and likely uses the same method each time. I don’t think these women went anywhere willingly with him. I think they were ambushed and abducted.

  “Poppers, snappers, whippets, fumes people sniff and huff or inhale from bags.” I suggest volatiles typically abused in cases we see. “Aromatic and aliphatic hydrocarbons, solvents found in Magic Markers, adhesives, glues, paint thinners, propane, butane, or alkyl halides in cleaning fluids. But hard to use any of these as a means to subdue someone for purposes of abduction, I should think.”

  “There are any number of volatile organic compounds that could render someone unconscious,” my chief toxicologist says. “Toluene, carbon tetrachloride, one-one-one-trichloroethane, tetrachloroethylene, trichloroethylene, provided you use high enough levels.”

  “Almost anything can be a poison or render someone unconscious if administered the wrong way, in a deliberately harmful way.” I ponder what she’s describing. “But it’s a matter of what’s practical and accessible, and what might occur to a perpetrator and what he might be comfortable with.”

  “Basically, what can be used as a weapon.”

  “Exactly,” I reply. “And I’m not sure you’d douse a cloth with paint thinner or dry-cleaning fluid and clamp it over someone’s nose and mouth, for example, if your intention is to incapacitate that person instantly. And you certainly wouldn’t try it if you’re not sure it would work.”

  “Diethyl ether, nitrous oxide, and chloroform.” She names the three earliest know
n general anesthetics. “Chloroform is easily acquired if one is involved in an industry or works in a lab where it’s used as a solvent. Unfortunately, as the whole world now knows, it’s also possible to make it at home. All you need are chlorine bleach powder and acetone, the recipe available on the Internet.”

  She’s alluding to what was sensational news not long ago, the highly publicized trial in Florida when Casey Anthony was acquitted for the murder of her two-year-old daughter, Caylee. Televised testimony claimed the Anthony home computer was used for Internet searches on how to make chloroform and that traces of it were detected in Casey Anthony’s car trunk. While none of this resulted in a conviction, it could have planted a diabolical idea into a demented person’s head. One can shop at the hardware store and find instructions online to mix up chloroform in the garage or kitchen or workplace and use it to incapacitate or kill.

  “Maybe he knocks them out.” Phillis continues to offer possibilities. “Drives off with them in his car trunk so if they come to in transit, they can’t pose a problem, can’t struggle with him.”

  “He may use a boat,” I reply, recalling what was said to me.

  Mildred Lott was so afraid of a kidnapper or someone else with criminal intentions mooring a boat behind the Gloucester mansion that she inquired about insurance and asked that the deep-water dock be removed, a request her husband denied because of his yacht. Who, in addition to him and key members of his staff, knew she was consumed by this worry? It would be a dangerous suggestion to make to the wrong person.

  Don’t announce what you fear could happen or someone evil might make it come true.

  “Brain’s going to be your best bet. Chloroform binds to proteins and lipids. It infiltrates neurons,” I say to Phillis, as I get up from my desk and notice the two SUVs that were picked up on security cameras moments ago as they waited for the gate to open.

  The black Yukon driven by Channing Lott turns east on the street below, perhaps returning to his headquarters in Boston’s Marine Industrial Park. It interests me that he is alone with his young, attractive CFO, while Galbraith, in a silver Jeep with a mesh grille, heads the opposite way toward Harvard.

  “Assuming the victim wasn’t kept alive long after it was used,” Phillis Jobe lets me know. “Two or three hours, maybe four. After that, we might not find it.”

  Kept alive for what? An assault of some type that may not be physical, and I think of Peggy Stanton’s undigested food. I imagine her eating dinner somewhere that April night and being grabbed or knocked out as she was returning to wherever she was parked, then driven someplace, possibly in her own car. What I’m certain of is at some point she was conscious long enough to break her nails and step in red-stained wooden fibers that got embedded in the bottoms of her feet, and I recall the inside of her closets and dresser.

  I envision the neatly folded clothes hanging and on shelves and in drawers, slacks and pantsuits, sweaters and blouses, old and unstylish, and not a single pair of nylon stockings, yet her dead body had on torn pantyhose. I imagine her waking up in a nightmare, inside the place he held her, a place where he had no fear of discovery and could completely control her.

  I wonder if he had dressed her in hose, a skirt, a jacket with antique buttons by then, if she regained consciousness in clothing that didn’t fit and wasn’t hers. Or did he force her to dress herself in a costume that means something to him, perhaps garments that once belonged to the original source of whom and what he hates?

  Peggy Stanton had a cluster of contusions on her upper right arm, what appear to be fingertip bruises, and I think of Luke’s speculation that they weren’t inflicted through clothing but rather by someone gripping her bare skin. He theorized that the killer terrorized and humiliated her by stripping her nude the same way prisoners of war are tortured, and I don’t think that’s it.

  I don’t believe the killer wanted her naked. I think he wanted her dressed for the role he sadistically cast her in, and months after she was dead and desiccated he adjusted the wardrobe, the jewelry, so it didn’t fall off her mummified body when he pushed it overboard into the bay. I explain all this to Ernie Koppel as I continue making evidence rounds by phone.

  “I need to rule out that she was dressed this way when she left her house,” I say to him. “If at all possible, I’d like to answer that. This is a bad one, Ernie.”

  “I know.”

  “And I’m pushing everyone.”

  “Imagine that,” he says sportingly.

  I ask him about fibers he recovered from inside Peggy Stanton’s Mercedes, explaining that I saw no clothing inside her house remotely similar to what she had on when I recovered her body from the water.

  “I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to take a look,” I then say, and it’s my way of acknowledging I’m persistent and always in a hurry. “Any chance the fibers you collected from her car could have come from the clothing she had on? If she was dressed that way for some unusual reason when she went out last, most likely this past April twenty-seventh?”

  Specifically, I want to know if fibers recovered from the floor, the seats, and the trunk might have come from the dark blue wool Tallulah jacket, the gray wool skirt, the purple silk blouse, and Ernie says no.

  “Carpet fibers, synthetics,” he says, and then he gets to the wood fibers he thought were mulch.

  “They’re not,” he lets me know. “I’m not saying I know what this stuff is used for, but it wasn’t made by feeding wood or bark through a tub grinder and spraying it with a dye.”

  He says he used gas chromatography–mass spectrometry, GC–MS, to analyze what he recovered from the driver’s area of the Mercedes, and the red-stained wood debris has a specific cyclic polyalcohol profile consistent with American oak.

  “Characterized by a richness in deoxyinositols, especially proto-Quercitol,” he explains. “A very interesting way of identifying the botanical origin of natural woods used in aging wine and spirits, obviously to guarantee authenticity. You know, some winemaker or distributor claims a red wine was aged in French oak barrels and GC–MS says nope, it wasn’t. It was aged in American oak barrels, so there’s no way what you’re about to pay a fortune for is a Premier Grand Cru Bordeaux. Quite a science to it, and you can imagine why. If a distributor is trying to sell you a young wine they’re passing off as a fine one?”

  “Bordeaux?” I ask. “What’s this got to do with wine?”

  “The wood fibers from her car,” he replies.

  “You think they’re from wine barrels?” I can’t imagine what that might mean.

  “Common oak, white oak used in cooperage to make barrels, and also a secondary source of tannic acid, or the tannins you find in red wine,” he says. “In your case we’re talking American oak stained a red-wine color, with trace elements of burned wood, most likely from what’s known as toasting or charring the inside of the barrel, and sugar crystals and other derivatives such as vanillin, lactones.”

  “A woody debris that looks like mulch but isn’t. Wineries or some place that makes use of wine barrels,” I think out loud. “But not where the barrels themselves are made, because new barrels wouldn’t be stained.”

  “They wouldn’t be.”

  “Then what?”

  “It’s frustrating as hell,” he says. “I can tell you the origin of this stuff likely is wine barrels, but I can’t tell you why it’s shredded, absolutely pulverized, or what it was used for.”

  He mentions that it is a common practice for people to cut old wine barrels into pieces, char them, and toss them into whiskey they’re aging.

  “But this stuff’s way too fine for that, fine like dirt,” he says. “Doesn’t look like it was from planing or sanding, either, but I suppose the debris could be from someplace where old wine barrels are being recycled or reused for something.”

  I’m aware that barrels no longer suitable for aging wine can be handcrafted into furniture, and I recall some of the unusual pieces inside Peggy Stanton’s house, the tabl
e in the entryway, where her car key was found, the oak table in the kitchen. Everything I saw was antique and certainly not recycled from used barrels, and there was no evidence she collected wines or even drank them.

  “What about the woody fibers from the bottom of her feet and under her nails?” I inquire. “Same thing?”

  “American oak stained red, some of it charred,” he answers. “Although I didn’t find sugar crystals and some of these same derivatives.”

  “They would have dissolved in the water. It’s probably safe to assume what was on her body and tracked into her car came from the same source,” I decide. “Or better put, possibly the origin of the debris likely is the same location.”

  “You can assume that,” he agrees. “I was thinking of checking with some wineries around here to see if they know what this wine barrel debris might be—”

  “Around here?” I interrupt him. “I wouldn’t.”

  thirty-six

  IT IS ALMOST FOUR P.M. WHEN I WALK INTO THE WAR room, as it’s called, where experts and investigators, including scientists and doctors from the military, convene face-to-face both in person and remotely. Here behind closed doors we wage battle against the enemy using high-definition video and CD-quality audio, and I recognize who is speaking.

  I hear General John Briggs’s deep commanding voice saying something about transport on an Air Force plane in Washington state. A C-130, he says, and he’s talking about someone I know.

  “He just took off from McChord, will land in about an hour.” The chief of the Armed Forces Medical Examiners, my boss, fills integrated LCDs around the geometrically shaped computer conference table.

  “He won’t supervise, of course. He’ll be there to observe,” Briggs says, and displayed on the deep blue acoustical upholstered walls are scene photographs that are unfamiliar to me, a skull, scattered bones, and human hair.