The Bone Bed (12 page)

fourteen

INSIDE BLACK PLASTIC SHE’S PITIFULLY WIZENED, HER
long white wet hair plastered over her leathery face. Her frail body seems to disappear inside a long gray skirt, a dark blouse that’s either purple or burgundy, and a navy blue jacket with tarnished metal buttons. All of the clothing seems at least four sizes too big.

“What news are you talking about?” Marino pulls down his surgical mask.

“Apparently, video footage of my examining the leatherback and recovering the body is everywhere.” I spread open the pouches and smell moldy old flesh. “Let’s get photos in situ of the way she’s bound. I’m going to need to remove the ligature around her ankles if I’m going to PERK her.”

“A double fisherman’s knot. And this is the backup knot. The knots on each rope are exactly the same,” Marino observes.

He begins photographing the severed lengths of yellow nylon rope wrapped and knotted around the dead woman’s ankles and neck.

“Which is exactly what it sounds like,” he says. “You tie your primary knot, this one here, basically a double overhand knot. Then, for good measure, one of these.”

He points a blue-gloved finger to show me.

“A backup, just to make sure everything’s secure,” he adds. “So what someone did was wrap two separate ropes around her ankles and neck, and tied two knots on each, leaving the longer ends to be tied to the dog crate and boat fender, and it will be interesting to see what those knots are. I’m betting they’re the same.”

He looks up at the clock and shakes his head.

“You’re asking for it, Doc.”

“Is there any particular reason to choose these types of knot, in your opinion?” I lock a new blade in a scalpel handle.

“No logical one. Usually a double overhand’s what you use to join two separate fishing lines or if you’re attaching two different ropes to each other, which isn’t the case here. So there’s no good reason, except it’s probably what someone’s used to. You’re going to be late as hell, and this ain’t a hair appointment.”

“What someone’s used to could tell us what sort of person is responsible.”

“I think we’ve already figured whoever dumped her did it from a boat,” he says. “I mean, she wasn’t pushed out of a plane or a chopper.”

“I don’t know what she was pushed out of.”

Moving clothing out of the way, I make a small incision in the upper-right abdomen.

“A fisherman, someone into boating,” Marino says, as I insert a thermometer into the liver to get the core body temperature. “Someone who knows about ropes and knots. You don’t just tie knots like this by accident.”

Picking up a surgical knife from a cart, I cut through the yellow rope tightly looped three times around her ankles, and I tape the ends, labeling them, so I know which segment was attached to what. I measure the length and width of the rope, careful not to disturb the knots.

“Marks around her ankles are very superficial abrasions,” I note. “No furrows or contusions, barely anything at all made by the ligature. Her neck will probably be the same, but we’ll save that for later.”

“She was tied up long after she was dead.” He takes close-ups of the faint lines around her ankles.

“There’s no question about it,” I agree. “Toenails painted pale pink and chipped. And she’s got some sort of reddish staining on the bottom of her feet, which is strange.”

“Like maybe she had on red socks or red shoes at some point, something that faded on her?” Marino bends down to photograph the bottoms of her feet, the camera’s shutter clicking repeatedly.

“More likely she was barefoot and stepped in something.” I look with a light and a lens, the dark reddish staining on the shrunken bottoms of her toes, the balls of her feet, and her heels. “Something that obviously doesn’t wash off in water, something she might have stepped in. That’s what it looks like to me. Whatever it is, it dyed her skin or is embedded in it, or both.”

Using the scalpel, I lightly scrape some of the staining off the bottom of her left foot, wiping reddish flecks of skin off the blade and into an envelope as I resume relaying to Marino what Ron told me.

“It’s on local TV stations but is also national news, fairly close-up video footage, some of which was taken from the air, but he’s not sure all of it was,” I explain. “We know there was a news chopper when we were on the fireboat, but what about when it was just the two of us with the Coast Guard? How about covering a table with sheets.”

I peel the back off the smart label and stick it on the yellow silicone bracelet, which I fasten around her right wrist, and her skin is shriveled and tough like leather that is wet. Her fingernails are painted the same color as her toenails, a subtle peachy-pink, and they’re broken, the polish peeling off, chipped and scratched, as if she were clawing at something or digging with her bare hands.

“Obviously the other helicopter did the filming if it shows you in the water.” Marino shakes open a plasticized sheet.

“Unless someone was filming from a boat.” On her right index finger is a ring, an 1862 three-cent silver coin set in a heavy yellow gold mounting. “There were a lot of boats around,” I remind him.

“That big white chopper hovering over us the whole damn time you were getting her out of the water,” Marino decides. “I should have noticed the tail number, dammit.”

I try to wiggle the ring from side to side, puzzling over its size and that it fits snugly on her index finger when it shouldn’t, and I wonder if she originally wore it on a smaller finger or if the ring is hers at all. If it fits her index finger now, it wouldn’t have at death, because when a body begins to mummify, it becomes extremely dried out and literally shrinks the same way fruits, vegetables, and meats do inside a dehydrator. Jewelry, shoes, and clothing won’t fit the way they did in life, and I imagine someone moving the body from wherever it was concealed and rearranging her jewelry or perhaps dressing her a certain way before she was tethered and dumped into the bay.

Why?

To make sure the ring was found? To make sure her personal effects were?

“I made a note of the tail number, wrote it down,” I’m saying to Marino, as I’m pondering these other things. “We can have it checked out with the FAA database.”

“It probably will come back to the bank financing it or some meaningless limited liability company; same thing Lucy does. So when the cops are behind one of her batmobiles or batcycles, they can’t run her plate and figure out who she is, and air traffic controllers can’t connect that sweet radio voice of hers with a name.”

His Tyvek-covered feet make a slippery sound as he moves around.

“Almost none of these choppers, even news ones, come back to anything that’s helpful,” he says. “Especially if they’re privately owned. When I started out as a cop, the world wasn’t so friggin’ anonymous. And you’re going to be late as hell. No way you can make it by two unless you’ve got a jetpack.”

“The white helicopter with red and blue stripes on the tailboom struck me as private or corporate.” I pick up her left hand, holding it in my two gloved ones, and I look at the watch fastened snugly around her wrist with a black silk strap. “Except for the camera mounted on it. Assuming it was a video camera and not a FLIR. But either is unusual for private or corporate aircraft.”

“Pretty sure I’ve never seen that bird around here.” Marino shakes open a second sheet. “Which is a little weird, because most of them end up flying right past us over the river on what’s called the Fenway Route, in and out of Logan. Sure as hell got no idea what TV station it might be, if any, or how the hell they’d know we were out there and what we were doing. I know Judge Conry likes you, but you’re pushing your luck.”

“I am because I have to,” I reply. “This lady can’t wait.”

“You’d better hope the judge sees it that way.”

The watch appears to be Art Deco, in white gold or platinum, the bezel set with diamonds or some other clear gemstones, the movement mechanical. The time on the white oblong face is frozen at four minutes past six o’clock, and I can’t know if that is a.m. or p.m. I can’t know the date the watch stopped.

“Maybe some other type of filming,” Marino then considers. “If they’re filming a movie or commercial around here and whoever was flying just happened to see what we were doing and grabbed footage.”

“It’s obviously not Lucy’s new bird.”

“Haven’t seen it yet,” he says. “She’s too busy going after pig farmers to give me a ride.”

“We won’t remove her jewelry now, but let’s get photos, lots of photos. She’s not going to look like this when we get back.”

“Have got a shitload already, but I’ll get more.”

“More is better.”

“Why would it be Lucy’s?” Using the ruler as a scale, he places it next to the wrist wearing the watch. “She sure as hell wouldn’t be moonlighting for some TV station or film crew, or posting videos of you all over the Internet.”

“Of course not.”

“You should give her the tail number and ask her to run it,” he says. “I guarantee she’ll figure out who it is and why they were spying on us.”

“We don’t know that whoever was in that white helicopter was spying. Maybe they were just curious. There also was a sailboat nearby,” I recall. “A tall ship with red sails that were furled. It was sitting out there maybe a hundred yards from us when we were getting her and the gear out of the water, and it never moved. I’ll e-mail the tail number to Lucy.”

I dip swabs into distilled water.

“If we can find out where this lady died, we might find pieces of her fingernails,” I decide. “No defensive injuries I can see so far, but she was doing something that broke all of her nails. Toenails, fingernails, every one of them.”

I rub the cotton tips under each fingernail, and the swabs turn a reddish tint.

“The same reddish staining that’s on her feet?” I wonder. “Whatever it is, I can’t get all of it. It’s way up in the quick.”

I hold the red-tinted swabs under the surgical lamp and examine them with the magnifying lens.

“Something fibrous, maybe,” I observe. “It reminds me of fiberglass insulation but more granular, like dust or dirt, and a darker color.”

I cut her nails with a pair of small scissors, and pink-painted slivers make quiet clicking sounds as they drop into the bottom of a paper envelope I hold open.

“I’ll take a look under the scope, then see what Ernie has to say,” I add, and I’m mindful of seconds slipping away, of time running out for the dead woman and me.

I might get in trouble, it could happen, and I label nail clippings and swabs for trace and DNA, and arrange syringes with different-gauge needles on a surgical cart as the minute hand on the wall clock ticks closer to two p.m. My pulse picks up, but I can’t stop, and inside a glass cabinet I collect ETDA blood tubes and FTA cards, although I know without a doubt that getting blood from her is going to be a challenge. It will have seeped out of vessel walls long ago, and I’ll be lucky if I get enough to blot a card.

“You scribe and keep taking pictures, and we’ll go at this really fast.” I check the flexibility of the neck, the arms, and try to separate the legs, but they’re stubborn. “Rigor’s indeterminate,” I dictate to Marino, and he writes it down as I remove the thermometer from the incision in her abdomen. “Temperature of her liver is forty-two degrees, and that’s interesting. Are we sure about the water temperature of the bay? Pamela Quick said it was fifty-one degrees.”

“The temp on the Coast Guard boat’s GPS was fifty-one degrees,” Marino confirms. “Of course, it would have been a little colder as the water got deeper.”

“Nine degrees colder at the depth where she was held in place by the ropes?” I doubt it. “And she didn’t get colder in water that is warmer than she was. What that means is she was colder than forty-two degrees when she first went in.”

“Maybe she was kept in a freezer somewhere.”

“There’s no damage to her from fish and other sea creatures, which she likely was going to get if she was submerged for even a day or two. I seriously doubt she was in the water long enough to thaw,” I decide. “Either she’d already begun to thaw when she went in or she was kept really, really cold somewhere but not frozen solid.”

I begin to undress her, the clothing soaking wet, soiled, and gritty, and she smells more strongly of decomposition. The foul acrid stench crawls up my sinuses and coats my teeth, and soon it will be bad enough to make my eyes sting.

“Shit,” Marino complains, and he swaps out his surgical mask for one with a filter.

I work silk-lined dark blue cashmere over her shoulders, pulling stubborn arms out of long, clingy sleeves, holding up her jacket to look at it front and back. I see no holes, no tears, no damage. But the three brownish metal buttons in front don’t match and look very old.

“Possibly antique. Possibly military,” I say to Marino. “Let’s get close-ups. Like the ring with the old coin, these could be important because they’re unusual.”

I spread out the soaking-wet jacket on the sheet-covered table, noting the long curved back, the tapered waist, the tonal embroidery on the sides and sleeves.

“The label is
Tulle Clothing,
size six. Well, she’s not a six now. More like a zero,” I comment.

“How do you spell
Tulle
?”

I tell him, and he jots it down on a clothing diagram. “It’s quite distinctive,” I add. “Sort of a Tallulah style.”

“Got no idea what that is.” He begins taking photographs of the buttons.

“Retro-cut, with structured shoulders and wide lapels, and ornate embroidery stitched in thread the same color as the fabric,” I explain. “Imagine Tallulah Bankhead.”

“Someone with money trying to be glamorous,” he says. “It doesn’t make sense if no one knows she’s missing.”

“Someone knows. The person who dumped her in the bay does.” I begin going over the buttons with a hand lens.

fifteen

TARNISHED BRASS WITH A HINT OF GILT, EACH BUTTON
has some type of eagle design and an iron shank at the back that has been sewn onto the jacket’s front with heavy dark thread.

“Civil War. The genuine article. Around the same date as the coin in her ring.” Marino leans close, peering through his reading glasses. “Holy shit, these are something.”

I return to the stretcher, and the putrid smell gets stronger as I begin unbuttoning the blouse. Decomposition is darkly swarming in like a plague of invisible insects as we work and time slips away, moving her closer to putrefaction as I move closer to being held in contempt of court.

“Probably not from a regular foot soldier. Probably officers’ buttons.” Marino reaches for a hand lens, judgment creeping into his tone. “Most people who collect old buttons don’t sew them on clothes. No normal person would do that.”

“It does seem a bit out of the ordinary,” I remark. “Wearing antique or estate jewelry and so on is one thing, but sewing it on clothing would be another, I suppose.”

“You got that right, and button collectors don’t.”

His voice is flinty with disapproval, as if he’s made a sudden decision about the dead woman’s character.

“They display them, put them in picture frames, swap them, sell them, maybe donate them to museums, depending on what they are,” Marino says. “I’ve seen buttons like these go for hundreds, even thousands, of dollars.”

He studies the three buttons closely with the lens, nudging each one with a gloved finger.

“If you look at them from the side”—he shows me—“they’re not dented in at all, are in really great shape, which adds to the value. You’d never sew something like this on a jacket. Who the hell does that?”

“Well, she did, or someone did,” I reply.

Removing her wet blouse, I decide it’s purple, not burgundy. The tag at the back of the collar is
Audrey Marybeth,
size six.

“Maybe she was involved in antiques,” I add. “Maybe she collected or was a dealer, or the buttons belonged to someone in her family.”

The bra underneath is loose around her chest, the cups several sizes too big, and I estimate the body has lost at least twenty percent of its weight due to dehydration. She dried out while concealed someplace freezing or near-freezing, cold enough to prevent bacteria from colonizing and causing the decomposition that is beginning with a vengeance now. Minute by minute her odor is stronger, and I’m asking for trouble. I imagine Judge Conry calling lawyers to the bench, wanting to know where I am, discreet at first, and then demanding.

“Plenty of people collect in this part of the world.” Marino has a hard look on his face, his mood turned sour. “You go in some of these junk shops and can buy vintage buttons, almost anything you can think of. Police, fire department, railroad, military. But you don’t sew them on clothes, not even nickel-plated ones that go for five bucks apiece. Not even ones in really shitty shape you can buy in bulk.”

“Since when are you an expert in vintage buttons?” I spread the blouse open next to the blazer.

“You really don’t care.” He’s looking at the clock, and it’s exactly two.

“What I care about most right this minute is getting what we need while there’s still a chance.”

Mostly I’m thinking about DNA. I’ve had cases where semen could still be recovered after a remarkably long time inside orifices, the stomach, the airway, deep inside the vaginal vault, and I’m not going to assume it’s too late to get anything from this body, no matter how long she’s been dead. The enemy of DNA is bacteria, and she’s invisibly beginning to teem with it, and it literally will eat her to the bone.

I can gauge the breaking down of her tissue by the way she smells, insidiously foul at first and then much stronger and fast becoming a bristling stench from organisms that originated in her bowels but were dormant while she was kept dry and very cold or frozen. As she has warmed by degrees in the bay, in the boat and van, and now inside this room, the bacteria that cause putrefaction are having their way with her. They have begun a process I might be able to retard slightly by refrigeration but certainly can’t stop. She’s decomposing rapidly right before our eyes.

“Remember when I first got into metal detectors?” Marino is asking, and I really don’t recall.

“Vaguely.” I reach around to unzip her long gray skirt, discovering a bunched area of the waistband that has been cinched.

Three heavy-duty staples fasten inches of the material together. Stainless steel, no sign of rust.

“Why the hell do that?” Marino looks on.

“Like I said, she’s not a size six anymore.”

“If she ever was.”

“When she was alive, she was bigger than this,” I reply. “That much is a fact.”

“But if the skirt slid off her because it was too big, it wouldn’t have been lost because of the rope around her ankles and the dog crate,” he says. “Why go to the trouble?”

“It depends on when it was done. All I can say with certainty is someone made the waistband smaller.” I pull the skirt down over her wrinkled bare pale legs, surprised to find what’s left of sheer pantyhose.

The stockings are in tatters, ripped off mid-thigh, and in my mind I see her alive. I see her terrified, locked up and trying to escape.

Clawing, pounding a door, breaking her nails. Frantically moving around shoeless on a surface covered with something dark red.

Then nothing; the picture blanks out. I can’t imagine what happened to her stockings except the legs weren’t cut with anything sharp. The ultra-sheer nylon has runs all the way up through the control top, and what is left around the thighs is shredded, torn unevenly, like ragged transparent gauze loose around her sallow dead skin. Did she rip off her hose mid-thigh? If so, why?

Or did someone else do it?

The same person who stapled the skirt around the waistband and arranged jewelry so it wouldn’t fall off the body and be lost.

Like the jacket, the skirt is distinctive, quite stylish, constructed of two jersey layers that flow into a raw-edged handkerchief hem,
Peruvian Connection,
size six. I spread it on the sheet to dry as Marino resumes reminiscing about our early days together in Richmond, when apparently he became quite the treasure hunter, using a metal detector he kept in the trunk of his unmarked Ford to search crime scenes, primarily outdoor ones, for metal evidence, such as cartridge cases.

“Mainly when I was working evening shifts and had most of the day off,” he’s saying, but the memory doesn’t make him cheerful and boisterous, the way he usually gets when he talks about our past.

His voice has a hard, unforgiving ring that reminds me of a shovel striking stone.

“I’d go out early in the morning to old battlefields, woods, riverbanks, looking for coins, buttons, whatever I could find. Got a belt buckle that cleaned up real good. You probably remember it.”

I don’t think I do, but I know better than to tell him.

“Brought it to your office and showed it to you,” he says, and he’s always liked massive buckles, especially motorcycle ones. “Oval-shaped, with U.S. stamped on cast brass in real big letters.”

I place nude panties and the pantyhose and the bra on a sheet, and move the surgical light closer. I check her for lividity as Marino again examines the antique buttons, leaning close, shining a light on them.

“No sign of livor anteriorly,” I note.

“What about when someone’s been dead and maybe in a cooler or freezer this long? Maybe they won’t have it anymore.”

“Unlike rigor, livor doesn’t completely go away. It leaves a telltale sign.” I look at her from head to toe, taking time I don’t have, moving the overhead lamp as I search for the slightest hint of staining from when her circulation quit and blood settled due to gravity.

“I eventually sold it for five hundred bucks. Wish I hadn’t now, because it sure as hell was worth more than that,” Marino resumes talking about treasure hunting. “Also a two-piece CS buckle I found in Dinwiddie. Could have brought me a couple of grand if I hadn’t needed quick bucks when Doris bailed, ran off leaving me with a shitload of debt. She’s probably still with that douchebag car salesman, except I think he’s selling Aflac now.”

“Maybe you should find out.”

“No way in hell. A real entrepreneur she’s become,” he says sarcastically. “Covers bricks with cloth and sells them as doorstops, no kidding, I mean, go figure. Like a symbol, huh? Something that gets in the way, an obstruction, a stumbling block, but not how she looks at it, of course.”

“Maybe you should try to talk to her and find out from her how she looks at it.”

“You can pull it up on the Internet,” he says angrily. “Open Says Me. The name of her website.
I hold open your world to possibilities.
I can’t believe it.”

It figures he’d bring up his ex-wife when we don’t have time to talk about her. I pull the body on its left side, and it’s so light it feels hollow.

“There can be a lot of money in historic stuff like buttons, medals, old coins, but there’s also such a thing as respect.” He’s back to that. “What you don’t do is sew antique military buttons on a jacket or a coat to make a friggin’ fashion statement.”

“You can see it here. A livor pattern of hemolyzed blood.” I press my fingers into different areas of the back. “No blanching, because the blood has seeped out the vessel walls. So after she died she was flat on her back for at least as long as it took for livor to set, probably twelve hours, possibly more. It could be that she was on her back the entire time since she died, stored somewhere until she was moved and dropped into the bay.”

“You sure as hell don’t send a jacket to the dry cleaner’s if it’s got a thousand dollars’ worth of antique buttons on it.” He won’t stop talking about it. “But it’s not the money.”

“Moderate mummification, skin wet but hard and dried with faint remnants of patchy white mold on her face and neck,” I dictate, and Marino scribes. “Eyes sunken and collapsed.” I pry open her mouth. “Cheeks are sunken.” I swab the inside of them. “No lip, tongue, or dental injuries,” I say, as I check with a light. “Neck is free of any discrete discolorations.” I look up at the clock.

It’s eleven minutes past two. I move down and find more signs of moderate mummification but no injuries, and I open her legs. I ask Marino to bring me a Physical Evidence Recovery Kit, a PERK, or what a lot of cops call a rape kit, and I glance curiously at him as he walks to a cabinet, his face disgruntled and offended, as if there’s something about this dead woman he takes personally.

“We’ll definitely e-mail photos of the buttons and her jewelry to NamUs,” I say. “These details seem unique enough to be significant. Especially if it’s unusual to sew valuable antique buttons on clothing.”

“It’s damn disrespectful as hell.”

He hands me a plastic speculum and opens the PERK’s white cardboard box.

“When you find stuff like this, usually it’s because the person got killed in battle and their body was left out there in a field or the woods.”

He places bags, swabs, and a comb on a clean sheet.

“A hundred and fifty years later someone comes along with a metal detector and digs up their uniform buttons, their belt buckle, and when you find things like that you treat it like you’ve disturbed a grave, because you have.”

I glance up at the clock again as I rehearse what I’ll say to Dan Steward and Jill Donoghue when I see them, an apologetic explanation that I’ll expect one or both of them to relay to the judge. My choice was to lose possibly critical evidence or be late for court, and I’ll be very contrite.

“Even if the stuff comes from the attic,” Marino says, “it’s about respect, because it belonged to someone who made the ultimate sacrifice.”

He begins filling out forms with what scant information we have, and he rants on and on.

“You don’t sew buttons or shoulder epaulets on a jacket or put a dead soldier’s cap box on your damn belt or wear his friggin’ bloodstained socks. You don’t cut up old uniforms that still have the soldiers’ nametapes on them and make them into quilts.”

He hands me envelopes for swabs.

“If you didn’t go to Parris Island or OCS, then don’t wear official U.S. Marine cammies, and for shit’s sake don’t make them into a purse. Jesus Christ, what kind of person does shit like that?”

“Don’t see any evidence of sexual assault. Of course, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one.” I remove the speculum and toss it in the trash. “But it appears her legs were shaved not long before she died.”

I look at a scattering of dark stubble that when magnified indicate a razor was used.

“Several days before she died, based on the new growth,” I add. “Obviously the hair will seem a bit longer because of her dehydration. If she was kidnapped, she likely wasn’t kept very long.”

Marino’s face is dark red, his eyes wide, as if he’s reminded of something that really upsets him.

“What’s the matter with you?” I insert an eighteen-gauge needle into the left femoral artery.

“Nothing.” He talks the way he does when it’s something.

I try the subclavian next, inserting a needle below the clavicle. No luck, and I try the notch to puncture the aorta, and manage to get a few drops. When I open her up later today, what I’ll find is that her vessels are almost completely empty, the walls stained with hemoglobin, what looks like rust. For the most part, iron is all that’s left.

I drip thick, dark blood on two sample areas of an FTA micro-card and place it under a chemical hood to air-dry.

“If you’ll get her back inside the cooler, and this room stays locked. No one’s to come in here,” I tell Marino, as I pull off my lab coat. “Call DNA, let Gloria know they can collect the card within the hour. It should be dry by then, and we want a DNA profile as fast as they can manage, and it needs to be entered into NamUs, NDIS, with as little delay as possible.”

I toss the lab coat, shoe covers, and gloves into a bright red biohazard trash can and push open the door that leads into the air-locked vestibule, then the second door that leads into the corridor. It’s twenty past two and I can’t remember the last time I was this late for court or, better put, as late as I know I’m about to be. It will be at least two-forty-five, possibly as late as three-fifteen by the time Marino gets me to Fan Pier on Boston’s waterfront, I calculate, and that’s if traffic is reasonable.