The Bone Bed (16 page)

“We wouldn’t expect her to have water in her lungs, her stomach, not anywhere,” I say to Anne, but my eyes are on Benton. “She’s moderately mummified. She hardly has a drop of fluid in her entire body, barely enough to blot a card for DNA, and if she’s a drowning, she didn’t drown recently.”

My mind keeps going back to the way Marino acted earlier today, as if the dead woman was personally offensive to him. His upset over the vintage buttons on her jacket was bizarre, and I have an incredible premonition, an awful one.

“She’d been dead quite a while by the time she was weighted down and dropped into the bay,” I’m saying, “and I’m wondering who called this gathering?”

“We think we got an ID,” Sil Machado says.

twenty

HE TURNS TO BENTON AND SPECIAL AGENT BURKE AND
the woman I don’t know, as if it is up to them to continue, and I know what that means.

The Portuguese Man of War, as Marino calls Sil Machado, is a young hotshot, built like a bull, with dark hair and eyes and preppy taste in clothes, and he’s not a devotee of the FBI and doesn’t turn over a case to them without question and in some instances without resistance. If he’s deferring to them even as we stand here, then the Feds already have taken over the investigation, and there has to be a justifiable cause for it.

“How come nobody let me know?” Marino glares at Luke. “An ID based on what?” His tone is accusatory. “How’s that possible? It’s not like we could have DNA this fast, and forget a fingerprint match. That can’t happen without rehydrating her fingerpads, meaning we’re probably going to have to remove them first, which was what I planned to do—”

“Tell you what, Pete,” Machado interrupts him. “Why don’t you come with me, and we’ll let them talk while we go over a few things?”

“What?” Marino instantly is paranoid.

“We’ll go over everything.”

“You don’t want them talking in front of me?” Marino’s voice gets loud. “What the fuck!”

“Come on, buddy.” Machado winks at him.

“This is bullshit!”

“Come on, Pete. Don’t be like that.” Machado gets close to him, puts a hand on his arm, and Marino tries to shake him off, and Machado grips him harder. “Let’s go take a load off, and I’ll explain.” He escorts Marino out into the corridor. “I know you got coffee in this place, course what I’d really like is a beer, but forget it.”

“Let’s back up a minute.” I shut the door. “I thought I’d made it clear not to start this case without me.” I address this to Anne, to Luke. “So if what I’m seeing is the result of the FBI coming in here and giving directives to speed things along, that’s not how it works,” I add, and I’m not nice about it.

“It’s not like that,” Luke says to me.

But it is like that.

“The ID room is wide open, and you’ve started the scan when that wasn’t my instruction,” I reply.

Luke turns his chair around so he’s facing me, and there’s no sign he’s concerned about my displeasure or worried about why Marino was just removed from the room like a prisoner. Luke feels justified in what’s unfolding, and in part this is due to inexperience, and it may be he’s far more narcissistic than he seems, his well-mannered graciousness belying the ego I’d expect to accompany his blond good looks and gifted mind. My deputy chief is rather enamored of federal law enforcement agencies, the Secret Service and especially the FBI, which has managed to muscle him into rushing this case along, and I simply won’t allow it.

“I wasn’t going to start the autopsy without you,” Luke explains, in his reasonable, pleasant British accent, dressed in scrubs, surgical clogs, and a lab coat with his name embroidered on it. “But we thought it might be expedient to go ahead and scan her while you were on your way back from court. Mainly because of the condition she’s in, I doubted we’d find much on CT, anyway.”

“And there’s basically nothing.” Anne’s tone is subdued, unnerved by my reaction to what she and Luke have done, and she’s probably upset about Marino, who flirts and kids with her, and for a while was giving her rides to work every day when she broke her foot. “No internal injuries,” she says quietly, seriously, not looking at Luke or Benton, at anyone but me. “No evidence of what might tell us why she’s dead. I mean, she’s got some cardiac calcifications, some intracranial ones that are common. Punctate in the basal ganglia, plus arachnoid granulations, typical with aging, in people over forty.”

“Hold on, now.” Special Agent Burke is casual tonight in a brown sweater and black jeans, a leather shoulder bag likely concealing her gun. “Let’s not talk about turning forty.” She thinks she’s funny.

“Evidence of atherosclerosis, calcification in some blood vessels.” Anne isn’t amused.

“You can tell hardening of the arteries from a CT scan?” Nothing Burke does is going to lighten the mood. “Seems like that’s a good thing to find out before I eat another Whopper.”

“Eat what you want; you don’t look like you’ve got a worry,” Luke says to her, and maybe he’s flirting. “They’ve found atherosclerosis in Egyptian mummies four thousand years old, so it’s not just a by-product of modern life. In fact, it’s probably part of our genetic makeup to be predisposed to it,” he adds, because he just doesn’t get it, or maybe he doesn’t care that Marino is in trouble.

“I suppose we have to consider she might have died from a heart attack or stroke, in other words, natural causes, and someone decided to conceal the body, then get rid of it.” Burke’s eyes are steady on mine.

“At this stage, it’s wise to consider everything, to keep an open mind,” I answer.

“Nothing else radio-opaque except dental restorations,” Anne informs me. “And she has plenty of those. Crowns, implants, an expensive mouth.”

“Ned’s coming in to compare charts,” Luke lets us know. “In fact, that’s probably him now.”

Car lights are white and glaring on a closed-circuit security screen, a small blue hatchback, Ned Adams’s ancient Honda parking in the lot.

“Then we must already have premortem x-rays for comparison.” I direct this to Benton.

“Records we got from a dentist in Florida,” he says.

“Who do we think this lady is?” I ask him.

“It’s looking like she’s a forty-nine-year-old Cambridge resident named Peggy Lynn Stanton. She usually spends her summers at Lake Michigan, Kay,” my FBI husband replies, as if we are amicable colleagues. “Much of her time is spent away from Massachusetts. It appears it was her habit to be here usually in the winter and fall only.”

“It seems strange to spend winters here. That’s usually when people leave,” I remark.

“Sometimes she’d go to Florida,” Burke says. “There’s a lot to find out, obviously.”

“Meaning friends, possibly her family, weren’t always sure where she was?” I ask dubiously. “What about telephone calls, e-mail . . . ?”

“We sent agents to check,” Burke says. “Well, why don’t you pick up here?” She directs this to the woman I don’t know. “Valerie Hahn’s with our cyber squad.”

“And for the record, everybody calls me Val.” She smiles at me, and she shouldn’t bother.

I don’t feel friendly and am consumed by worry. What has Marino done?

“The bottom line is it certainly appears she never got to her cottage on the lake,” Valerie Hahn says. “It’s totally abandoned. No luggage. Nothing in the fridge. It’s looking like she vanished into thin air around the first of May, possibly earlier, and Dr. Zenner mentioned that could be consistent with the condition of the body?”

“I’ll know better when we autopsy her.” It rankles me that Luke has told them anything.

“I don’t know if you might have heard her mentioned?” Valerie Hahn says to me.

I open the door leading out into the corridor, where Ned Adams is headed toward us, carrying his old black leather medical bag.

“Why would I have heard her mentioned?” I ask bluntly.

“I’m just wondering if the name
Pretty Please
means anything to you, or perhaps anyone on your staff?” Hahn says.

“Hello, Ned.” I hold open the door for him. “She’s in the scanner. Help yourself.”

“I can do it in there. Sure.” He pushes back the hood of a long yellow raincoat that is dripping water on the floor. “Her films are up to date. Lots of crowns, implants, root canals, including a panoramic x-ray that’s good of the sinuses. You got those?”

“I can put them up on the screens even as we speak.” Anne starts typing. “You want a printout, too?”

“An old-fashioned guy like me still likes paper. She has lots of features, an embarrassment of riches, shouldn’t take long. Are we hot?” He pauses at the door leading into the scanning room as if it’s a military operations area that might be dangerous.

“The scanner’s offline,” I tell him. “You know how to slide out the table?”

“I do.” He takes off his coat.

“Presumably because her initials are PLS,” Douglas Burke explains. “One might suspect that’s where
please
comes from.”

“You’re on Twitter, aren’t you, Kay?” Valerie Hahn acts as if we’re friends.

“Barely.” I’m beginning to understand, or I think I do. “I don’t use it to socialize or communicate.”

“Well, I know you never tweeted Peggy Lynn Stanton, whose handle on Twitter is
Pretty Please,
” Hahn says.

“I don’t tweet anyone.”

Marino, what have you done?

“It’s easy enough to see that you two weren’t tweeting each other.” Hahn is quite sure of herself. “One doesn’t even need admin privileges to see that.”

“I don’t think we need to get into this level of detail right now.” Benton watches Ned Adams through glass.

“I think we do.” I look at him until he looks at me.

“Suffice it to say that at least something useful came from all the television coverage.” I can read Benton’s reluctance in the flatness of his eyes. “Our office in Boston got phone calls, Cambridge got phone calls, Chicago and Florida got calls, at least a dozen people certain the dead woman is Peggy Stanton, whom these people said they haven’t seen or heard from, apparently, since at least May, when she was supposed to be on her way to her Lake Michigan cottage or possibly Palm Beach. People here assumed she was in Illinois and people up there assumed she was still here. Some people assumed she was in Florida.”

“People? As in friends?” It is all I can do to mask how much I don’t like this.

“Various volunteer groups and churches.” Benton knows exactly what I’m feeling, but it doesn’t matter.

This is how we do our jobs. This is how we live.

“Apparently she was very involved in eldercare. Here, in Chicago, in Florida,” he says.

“She has family and they haven’t wondered where she is after all these months?” I think about what Marino said to me in the car this morning when we were on our way to the Coast Guard base.

“Her husband and two kids died thirteen years ago when their private plane crashed.” Benton reports the information objectively, and he can sound so cold.

But that’s not who he is.

“An investment broker with a hefty life insurance policy,” he reports. “Left her fairly well off, not that she was poor to begin with.”

“None of her vendors have complained that she’s not paying her bills? No one noticed she wasn’t answering e-mails or her phone?” I don’t say what I’m thinking.

How simple it would be to hoodwink Marino in cyberspace, where he doesn’t know how to navigate and his insecurity makes him vulnerable.

“She’s been paying her bills all this time,” Benton replies. “She was tweeting as recently as two weeks ago. She’s made calls from her cell phone as recently as the day before yesterday—”

“Not the person in there. She certainly didn’t.” Luke interrupts Benton while watching Ned Adams through the window.

“Someone’s been doing it.” Benton finishes what he was saying, but he doesn’t say it to Luke.

Inside the scanner room, Ned Adams opens his black leather bag. He puts his glasses on. He squints up at a video screen displaying dental x-rays.

“She’s been dead quite a lot longer than two days or two weeks,” Luke volunteers, when he really should shut up. “She certainly hasn’t been tweeting or writing checks or making phone calls for quite some time. Months, at least, I’d say. Would you agree, Dr. Scarpetta?”

“Her house is on Sixth Street,” Benton says to me. “Very close to Cambridge P.D., which just makes this all the more curious. No one’s been in it. The alarm is set, the car in the garage, police driving past it every day, and no one the wiser.”

“A time capsule,” Douglas Burke adds. “The fire department’s at the ready to breach the back door as soon as we get there.”

“I suggest you might want to go pick up those pizzas I asked you to order,” I say to Benton in a way that communicates exactly what I want him to know.

This is my office. The CFC doesn’t answer to the FBI. I will handle this case as I see fit.

“I’m posting her first. Her house can wait,” I add, in the same tone. “It’s waited half a year. It can wait two hours longer, but she can’t.”

“We were hoping Dr. Zenner could take care of the autopsy and you’d come with us and take a look,” Burke suggests.

“Whatever you need me to do.” Luke gets up from his chair as Anne walks into the scanner room and hands printouts to Ned Adams.

“What I need is for you to give us a chance to do our job here,” I reply, as the x-ray room door opens, and now Lucy is here, looking at me from the corridor. “Searching a potential crime scene is much more meaningful if we know how the victim died and what we might be looking for.”

“Could I see you for a minute?” Lucy doesn’t step inside.

“If you’ll excuse me. I think we’re done for now,” I say to the FBI.

“I noticed your car in the bay.” I walk with Lucy back toward the receiving area, stopping where no one can overhear us. “I’m wondering why.”

“And I’m wondering a lot of things.” My niece is dressed the way she was when I saw her early this morning, all in black, and it’s not like her to show up when the FBI is in the area. “I’m wondering why Marino and Machado are in the break room with the door shut. I can hear them arguing, that’s how loud Marino is. And I’m wondering why a Sikorsky S-Seventy-six belonging to Channing Lott might have filmed you recovering that body from the water today?”

“His helicopter? That’s stunning.” I hardly know what to say.

With all that’s gone on since, I haven’t given the large white helicopter another thought since I e-mailed the tail number to Lucy while I was in the car with Marino, heading to court.

“That’s really rather unbelievable,” I add, as my thoughts dart through possibilities of what I should do.

Dan Steward needs to know before closing arguments. If Channing Lott somehow is behind his helicopter filming what we just watched in court, and I don’t know how he couldn’t be, then the jury should know before it begins to deliberate. But it may be too late for that.

“The Certificate of Airworthiness is registered in Delaware to his shipping company,” Lucy informs me.