The Bone Bed (17 page)

I can imagine how it would appear if I call Steward with this information and he’s forced to say in open court or even to the judge who the source is. The information would be damaging to Jill Donoghue.

Stay out of it.

“His fleet of some hundred and fifty car carriers, container ships, the M V Cipriano Lines,” my niece is telling me.

“I’m sorry.” I try to focus on what she’s saying.

“What the chopper’s registered to,” she says. “A shipping company named after his missing wife, Mildred Vivian Cipriano. Her name before they got married.”

twenty-one

AROUND THE CFC, FORENSIC DENTIST NED ADAMS IS
known as the tooth whisperer because of what the dead confide in him. Age, economic status, hygiene, and if that’s not enough to tattle about, teeth snitch on diet, drink, drugs, and if the person were pregnant or had acne or an eating disorder.

In his late sixties, slightly stooped, with bad knees and a deeply wrinkled face that has smiled more than frowned, Ned can determine minutiae from a single tooth that the deceased’s closest friends and family likely never knew or imagined. Peggy Lynn Stanton, he confirms, as we wheel her body along the corridor after weighing and measuring it in the receiving area, was victimized in life by a very bad dentist, who, as Ned puts it, cost her or someone “an arm and a leg.”

“A Dr. Pulling; now, how’s that for a name? Only he sure didn’t live up to it in her case, as I’m about to tell you.” Ned stiffly accompanies Luke and me toward the decomp cooler, his raincoat draped over his arm, a buoyant air about him, because his mission is successfully accomplished and he’s in no hurry to go home to an empty house. “Some cosmetic dentist in Palm Beach, Florida, who didn’t comply with the standard of care; not saying it was intentional. Maybe just incompetence.”

“Yeah, right,” Luke says sarcastically. “Where’s the loot?”

“Tooth number eight, a maxillary central incisor with extensive internal root resorption coupled with a buccal fistula,” Ned says. “You can’t miss this big internal radiolucency in the middle of the pulp canal in her pre- and postmortem radiographs.”

“This is under a crown?” I pull up the handle of the cooler door.

“Exactly. Trauma resulting in an infection and ongoing inflammation that went unchecked, and he slapped a porcelain crown on top of it anyway. I’m guessing this joker cost her about forty-K, all told, and a lot of pain and inconvenience. Her bite’s messed up, I’m pretty sure, but can’t prove it because I can’t exactly ask her if she suffered chronic headaches. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had TMJ, though. When you go to search her house, look for a night guard.”

As if that’s the most important thing I might find.

“The time frame for when the infection started?” I guide the gurney through frigid air stale with death, pushing past a silent sad audience of black-pouched mounds on steel trays, many of the patients stored here still unidentified.

“It’s hard to pinpoint, but based on her charts?” Ned’s breath fogs out. “I’d say it’s related to a root canal two and a half years ago, which was followed by the porcelain crown this past March.”

“So she was in Palm Beach as recently as March,” I assume, as we exit through the rear cooler door that opens onto the decomp room.

“She must have been.” Ned follows us in. “And it’s impossible for me to believe that by then the resorption hadn’t already progressed to involve the periodontal ligament space and the tooth. In other words, that damn tooth should have been extracted and not restored.”

“Yet one more crook in the world,” Luke says.

“Well, had she lived, she inevitably would have faced an extraction followed by an implant and another crown.” Ned sets his black bag on a countertop and drapes his coat over a chair as if he plans to stay for a while. “Lots of root canals—eight, to be exact—likely from trauma caused by drilling down healthy teeth for crowns that I doubt she needed. Her rear molars, for example? Why bother putting porcelain on teeth no one’s going to see? Use gold. Believe it or not, it’s cheaper.”

“Money, money, money.” Luke hands me a mask and gloves, his blue eyes calmly on mine, as if he can explain everything that’s happened, as if I should have no reason to be concerned about him.

“That and this same dentist was also doing facial injections,” Ned lets us know, as Luke and I put on shoe covers and gowns. “The newest trend that I have serious qualms about? Dentists injecting patients with Perlane, Restylane, Juvéderm, and other facial fillers, and also Botox. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but I don’t think dentists should be plumping up cheeks and smoothing out frown lines.”

We slide the body from the gurney to an autopsy table, and she looks tragically small and wizened on cold stainless steel. Turning on an examination light, I move it along its overhead track as Luke labels specimen containers on a cart, and my feelings about him are mixed and confusing. They’re ambivalent and scary, and I try not to think about the outrageous accusations Marino made in the car this morning. I don’t want to admit they might have merit.

“So this Dr. Pulling, who saw her in March, also injected her with fillers or Botox during that appointment?” I direct six thousand foot-candles of light at the anterior upper arms.

“Lip augmentation. One CC of Restylane,” Ned says. “It’s in her chart. At least the guy kept pretty good records.”

“Four small contusions.” I direct Luke’s attention to them. “With another one here.”

“A thumb bruise?” He reaches for the light’s handle, his arm lightly touching me.

“Possibly. On the opposite side. Very possibly a thumb bruise. Yes.” I show him, and he leans against me.

“Fingertip bruises from gripping her,” he describes. “Gripping her upper arm, four fingers there and the thumb here.”

“Thank you, Ned.” It’s my way of letting him know I’ve got what I need.

“At least it’s not one of these situations that I see all too often.” He picks up his black medical bag, worn and scuffed, a wedding gift from his wife, who’s dead. “All sorts of things charted that were never done so the dentist could submit claims to the insurance company or disguise noncovered services as those that are covered. Not to mention just plain shoddy work.”

“It’s really difficult to see, in her condition.” Luke uses a hand lens to examine the subtle contusions I’ve pointed out, and I’m aware of the whisper of his white gown moving as he moves, the intense light shining on his pale blond hair.

“It helps to illuminate areas at different angles, getting an overview before doing a close visual exam of a particular feature or features,” I suggest to him, as I feel the heat of him and the heat of the lamp. “The same way you enter a crime scene. The big picture first. Then narrow it down. Don’t fixate so much on one thing that you miss all of it.”

“I certainly wouldn’t want to be so fixated I miss all of it.” Luke adjusts the light again.

“Had a case not all that long ago that I was called in to consult on.” Ned collects his raincoat from the chair. “In New Hampshire, several patients with broken dental tools in their teeth.”

“Thanks so much, Ned.” I look up at him. “You saved the day, as always, and I’m grateful, the FBI is grateful, everybody’s grateful.”

He lingers by the door. “That particular dentist is up to his eyeballs in more than a hundred civil malpractice suits.”

“Benton ran out to pick up pizza, and I’m guessing he’s back by now,” I let Ned know.

“He’ll probably be going to prison for a few years and could be deported back to Iran.”

“Maybe check on the seventh floor?” I suggest. “I’m sure they’d love your company, if you’re not in a hurry to get home.”

“Maybe a few here as well?” Luke points out more brown spots, small and almost perfectly round, his arm touching mine, and I feel its firmness through the Tyvek sleeve. “If a grip was intermittent? Like we see when someone is being forcibly held, and the grip tightens and relaxes, tightens and relaxes. Would you expect fingertip bruises through her layers of clothing?”

I pick up a camera and the six-inch scale Marino labeled earlier today.

“Would you expect her to bruise like this through a blouse and a wool jacket?” Luke asks, and I begin to take photographs, because Marino isn’t here.

While I don’t know exactly what is happening, I’ve gathered he’s still upstairs, being questioned by Machado and the FBI, their interest related to Twitter, to the woman Lucy told me about. Someone Marino met on the Internet and recently
unfollowed
in more ways than one
, my niece said early this morning, when she informed me that he’d been sleeping over at the CFC on an AeroBed.

Twat
was the crude word Marino used while we were driving to the Coast Guard base, and whatever foolishness he got involved in, it’s simply not possible he recently was tweeting
Pretty Please,
or whatever name Peggy Lynn Stanton went by on the Internet. Marino may have been tweeting someone with that handle days and weeks ago, but it wasn’t this lady on the autopsy table. She was dead long before he began tweeting whoever he assumed she was, dead before he even got his Twitter account, possibly dead and in cold storage since the spring, and my mind sorts through information nonstop, my blood pounding.

My thoughts race to connections and possibilities, my pulse rushing hard. I try to distract myself from what I’m feeling as Luke touches me, as he brushes against me and I don’t stop it.

“I really didn’t mean to step over you,” he says, now that Ned is gone. “I sincerely apologize. I thought I was helping.”

I incise the brownish marks on the upper right arm to see if they are well defined beneath the epidermis. I look for staining left by hemorrhage that extends into the dermis or the deeper layer of the skin, and it does.

“The question, of course, is when she might have gotten these bruises.” I grab the lamp by its handle, shining it down her arms to the shriveled tips of her fingers, with their chipped polished nails that are clipped to the quick.

I check the undersides of her wrists and the tops of her hands.

“It’s very difficult, if not impossible, to age these contusions, because of her condition,” I add.

The light paints over the leathery upper chest, the wasted breasts, illuminating the wrinkled abdomen.

“But depending on the degree of force used by the person gripping her, she could have been bruised through layers of clothing,” I answer Luke’s question.

“Important to know if she was clothed or not, it seems to me,” he says. “I realize this is more Benton’s department. I’m not a profiler.”

“The FBI can be very persuasive.” I illuminate her hips, her upper thighs. “And I’m sure they were all the more convincing to you because Benton showed up with them. But we don’t work for law enforcement, Luke.”

“Of course not.”

“It’s our duty to objectively answer questions raised by the evidence.” I direct the light at her knees. “And we must vigorously adhere to chain of custody, meaning we don’t open up our evidence room for the FBI or allow them to whip us into a frenzy of activity, no matter their reason or sense of urgency.”

“He’s your husband, so I assumed—”

“Assumed that our being married changes how he does his job or how I do mine?”

“I apologize,” Luke says again. “But after his annoyance when we were in Vienna . . .”

He doesn’t finish. He doesn’t need to spell out that the last thing he’d want to do after Benton’s blatant display of jealousy last week is to anger him further. Luke knows he can. He knows why he can, and I’m not going to discuss my marriage with him or the truth about why he might be a threat to Benton.

I’m not about to openly admit to Luke Zenner that my husband and I have had our share of friction of late, episodes of uncertainty and distrust that aren’t as baseless and irrational as I’ve let on. If what we’ve fought about was truly groundless, Luke and I wouldn’t be dancing this dance of touching, of leaning, of lingering, of speaking the subtle language of heated attraction, and it’s only when it happens that I’m honest with myself.

“What I can’t help but wonder is if she might have been stripped of her clothing at some point,” Luke says, as I reposition the plastic ruler, the scale, for each photograph I take. “I offer that only because the contusions look quite distinct. Here and here.”

He moves closer, his forearm touching mine, his shoulder brushing against me as he bends into what he’s examining, and I don’t want to feel what I’m feeling.

“You can see where it appears someone’s fingertips pressed with considerable force, and I’m wondering if there were layers of fabric in the way.”

He leans forward, leans into me and stays there.

“Would the contusions look exactly like this, were that the case?” he asks.

“We can’t know for a fact whether she was bruised through clothing or not,” I reply.

“Would it be worthwhile to try the ALS?” He indicates the alternate light source still on the countertop, where Marino plugged it in hours earlier.

“It’s not going to help.”

“So that’s a no.” He meets my eyes.

“If you want to scan her in the very off chance you might visualize any faint or nonvisible bruises we’re missing, assuming we’re missing any brown patterns that are contusions?” I offer in a way that discourages him, because I must.

“It’s probably ridiculous.”

“It’s not ridiculous, just illogical,” I reply.

“I agree. I mean, what are the chances?” he says.

“The chances of finding the usual evidence the ALS can be most helpful with are next to none.” But that’s really not what I’m discouraging him from, and it’s not really what we’re talking about.

I won’t have an affair with him unless I decide I don’t care if I completely destroy my life. It’s not about whether he has a chance with me but about how crazy it is that I’m even thinking these thoughts.

“Body fluids, fibers, gunshot residue, latent prints, deep tissue bruises?” I’m still talking about the ALS and what it might find under different circumstances, and I’m letting him know I understand what it’s like to want what you can’t have.

“Right. Forget it,” he agrees.

“That’s what I recommend. Not that I don’t understand being tempted to try.”

“She’s been in the water,” he says. “A waste of time.”

“And then it has to be explained,” I add. “Everything we do has to be explained.”

“Should I unplug it?” He reaches for the ALS power cord.

“Please,” I reply. “I’m really not interested in putting on goggles and spending an hour scanning the body from head to toe with the Crime-lite just so I can say we did. It might be worth going over her clothing, but that can wait.”