The Bone Bed (22 page)

We are back in the entryway. I stop near the table with the glass bowl, where I’m sure Peggy Stanton never kept her car key, and Burke and I face each other, hooded and in white, with no pretenses or cordiality.

“He assaulted you five years ago in Charleston, South Carolina.” She fires the shot she’s saved. “He came to your house late at night and tried to rape you, and you never reported it to the police.”

There’s a note of triumph in her voice, and I’m sure I’m not imagining it.

“Why would you tell us anything now that might get him into trouble if you refused to do it then, after what he did?” she says.

“You don’t know the facts.” I hear footsteps on the front porch.

“I’m asking you for them.”

I don’t answer, because I won’t.

“Are you aware of what the statute of limitations for sexual assault is in South Carolina?”

“I’m not.”

“You haven’t exceeded it,” she says.

“It’s not relevant.”

“So you’re still protecting him.”

“You don’t have the facts,” I repeat.

“Here’s a fact. He used to be into treasure hunting. Yet something else you know about him,” Burke says, and it’s what she’s been waiting to do.

It’s why I’m here inside this house with you.

“And Peggy Stanton had Civil War buttons on her jacket. Did Marino bother to mention to you that he’d been tweeting a woman who collected antique buttons?”

“I’ve seen no evidence of an antique-button collection in this house,” I answer, with no emotion she can detect.

“You’re not going to talk to me about what he did to you.”

“I’m not.”

“Do you understand the problem I’m having? And it’s not as if I enjoy bringing this up. I’m sorry—” Douglas Burke starts to say, as the front door opens wide and rain blows in.

Benton is carrying something wrapped in a towel.

“If he’d really attempted to rape me, I can assure you he would have succeeded.” I don’t care who hears. “Pete Marino is a very big man, and at the time this occurred, he was armed. So if he’d intended to physically overpower me or put a gun to my head to make me do what he wanted, he could have. But he didn’t. He stopped what should never have started. But he stopped.”

Benton and Machado drip on the plastic-covered rug beneath the French chandelier, and the towel is dirty and wet, and I notice gray fur peeking out.

“A broken-out window with no screen,” Machado says, and what he just overheard seems etched in the air. “You know, near the ground, and the garage doesn’t have an alarm, maybe the cat somehow pushed it open and pushed out the screen. So I guess it’s been in and out of the garage all this time, made a bed in a box in there. Probably plenty to eat around here, or maybe people were feeding it.”

I take the cat from Benton, short-haired gray-and-white, with gold eyes and flat ears, a Scottish Fold that looks like an owl, the flea collar around its neck faded and old.

“No tag,” Benton says, and the look he gives Burke is piercing.

“Obviously an indoor cat. A girl. What’s your name?” I wrap her in a clean towel, and she doesn’t resist me. “I see. You’re not going to say.”

She’s thin and dirty but seems in relatively good shape, her claws very long and curled and needle-sharp.

“Well, it didn’t get out of the house on its own.” Benton looks at me, and he knows what just happened. “And she certainly wouldn’t have abandoned it.”

Peggy Stanton wouldn’t have put her cat outdoors and then left town, and his rage is simmering.

“So who let her cat out?” He pulls off his white hood and runs his fingers through his hair. “Someone who has no regard for human life but wouldn’t hurt an animal.” He bends over to take off his boot covers. “Had it been left in the house, it would have starved to death. So he came back. He let himself in. He knew her alarm code. And he had her keys.”

“There was an open bag of treats on the counter.” The cat has tucked its head under my chin and is purring. “Treats to lure her so he could let her out, perhaps?”

“Where are these treats?” Machado takes off his boot covers, and they are wet and dirty from walking outside.

I indicate the bags of evidence I’ve set on the entryway table.

“If he needed to lure the cat, then he wasn’t someone familiar,” Benton says.

“Did she run from you?” I ask.

“Came right up to us when we were inside the garage.”

“Well, she seems very friendly but maybe wasn’t with him. Maybe she sensed something that made her wary,” I reply, as I wonder what I’m going to do with her.

I’m not leaving her here.

“It looks like the electrical panel was recently modified.” Benton says this to me and ignores Douglas Burke, and I know when he’s seething. “A subpanel that doesn’t meet code. In the basement.”

“Hooked up to what?” The cat rubs against my ear, purring.

“To nothing. No slots left in the main panel. It looks like she had someone come in, maybe a handyman, maybe an electrician, but what was done is substandard. It appears she intended to install something that would need to be connected to a breaker.” Benton won’t look at Burke, practically has his back to her. “A new cable runs from the subpanel along the wall to a new outlet.”

“Work that’s recent; how recent?” Burke asks, and it’s Machado who answers, but he doesn’t answer her.

He explains to me that there is a work area in the basement, a large table with paintbrushes, cookie cutters, wooden utensils, and a rolling pin.

“Like she was going to do baking down there,” she says, and he describes a portable sink on casters, and I don’t know what he means.

“A portable sink?” I puzzle. “Connected to a faucet? Why would she bake in the basement? Why not use her kitchen?”

“More like a plastic basin on a stand with wheels. I can show you if you want,” Machado says.

“Yes, before I take all this off.” I mean the protective clothing. “She doesn’t seem to mind my holding her, so I don’t think she’ll mind if we look. There’s a basement door that leads outside?”

“What the firefighters came in.”

“We can go down and then out from there.”

“The sink or basin looks pretty new, right there in the area where the new outlet is.” He puts on clean boot covers. “Lots of pieces of cut wire scattered around. Black, white, green, number-six wire like you’d hook up to a pole circuit, to the neutral and ground bars,” he explains. “But whatever she planned to hook up, she didn’t get around to it. I’m thinking maybe she was going to put in an oven, but I agree it’s a strange place to bake cookies or whatever. We need to find who did that electrical work.”

twenty-six

THE RAIN HAS STOPPED, THE NIGHT COLD AND FLOODED,
as I drive home alone, just the cat with me.

Benton asked Burke to give him a lift to the CFC so he could get his car, but I don’t believe that’s the real reason. They will have words. He will let her know what he thinks of her being on pseudoephedrine, on speed, and laying into me aggressively, and the hell with her allergies. What she did was out of line. I don’t give a damn about the reason, and neither will he, and he’s enraged by what he overheard, and he should be.

It’s not that I don’t understand why Burke needs to know about Marino, but I wouldn’t have pushed the way she did, were I the investigator. It was wrong. It was badgering. It was bullying. There can be only one answer to how she knew what to confront me with, and I imagine her talking to Benton and have no doubt what he felt compelled to reveal. He couldn’t lie or evade, of course not. I tell myself I can’t blame him for being honest, and he couldn’t truthfully say Marino has never shown a potential for violence—specifically, sexual violence—because he has.

But Burke didn’t need the gory details, questioning me as if she wanted to envision it, as if she intended to humiliate and overpower, to do exactly what Marino did, and that’s what troubles me. I worry what her motive is, and I’m amazed by the way events recede so far into the past that they round a bend and end up in front of us again. What Marino did five years ago is directly in my face, so close I can touch it, I can hear it, I can smell it like a posttraumatic flashback. Nerves that were numb have come alive, tingling and smarting as I drive, and I will get past it, but I won’t forgive Douglas Burke. I blame her for willfully inflicting injury when it wasn’t called for, wasn’t warranted, certainly wasn’t needed to prove her goddamn point.

I follow Massachusetts Avenue through Harvard Square, the cat curled up in the towel on my lap, and it bothers me that I don’t know her name. The need to know it obsesses me, because she’s had her name for quite some time, likely since she was a kitten, and I don’t want to call her something different, something wrong. She’s been through enough.

Out in the weather and God knows what traumas she’s sustained and how lonely and hungry and uncomfortable she’s been, and I imagine Peggy Stanton putting food and water into bowls in the kitchen. I imagine her collecting her pocketbook and keys, going out somewhere and fully intending to return home. But the next time the door opened, it wasn’t her coming in.

A stranger using her house key, and he probably entered through the kitchen door so he wouldn’t be seen by the neighbors or by anyone on the street. This person who somehow abducted and killed her entered her alarm code and walked from room to room, leaving lights on in some of them, and I continue to be suspicious about the flowers and who they were from. I’m bothered by the car key found in the Lalique bowl, where I feel this person deliberately left it.

Left it for whom?

Flowers with no card. Fresh flowers that were never thrown away. Food and any perishables in the kitchen were cleaned out, but not the flowers, and I keep going back to that as I think of the key placed in the entryway near a door I doubt the killer used.

Who were these things left for, really?

I unlock my phone and call Sil Machado because I can’t call Marino.

“It’s Dr. Scarpetta.”

“What a coincidence.”

“Why a coincidence?”

“What’s going on, Doc?”

“I’m pondering her car being inside the garage.” I head north to Porter Square.

“Already delivered safe and sound to your bay. Why? What’s up?”

“The key you found inside the house,” I say. “For sure it’s her car key?”

“Yeah. I unlocked the driver’s door with it just to take a quick look but didn’t touch anything or try to start it.”

“That’s good. And what about the keychain?”

“I got the key, the keychain. Yeah.”

“I’d like to see them at some point.”

“Just a key and the pull-apart chain and an old black compass I’m thinking may have belonged to one of the little girls,” he says. “A Girl Scout compass. Maybe her little girls were Girl Scouts. Or Brownies, I guess. How old’s a girl got to be to go from a Brownie to a Girl Scout?”

“We don’t know that her daughters were Brownies or Girl Scouts.”

“The compass. Definitely a Girl Scout compass.”

“I think it’s possible he drove her car to her house, returned it to her garage, and left the key where he did because he didn’t know where she usually kept keys,” I tell him. “Because he probably didn’t know her. But more important, maybe he left the key there for a reason, possibly a symbolic one.”

“That’s interesting.”

“He may never have been inside her house before and walked around inside it after she was dead,” I continue. “But we need to be careful not to let that be known. I wanted to make sure I said that to you because I have a strong feeling he might not realize anyone would figure it out.”

“You mean that he went back in her house.”

“I mean that he went in there at all. Even if it was only once.”

“Interesting you’d say that, because I just got the alarm log. Other than the firefighters prying open the basement door with the hooligan?” He means a Halligan tool. “Last time the alarm system was disarmed was April twenty-ninth, a Sunday, at eleven-fifty p.m. Someone was inside the house for approximately one hour and then reset the alarm. Obviously this person left and never went back. There’s been no alarm activity since until tonight, like I said.”

“Not even false alarms?”

“All she’s got is door contacts. No motion sensors or glass breaks, none of the usual shit that goes off.”

“And before April twenty-ninth?”

“That previous Friday, the twenty-seventh,” he says. “A couple ins and outs, and then someone left around six p.m., reset the alarm, and it wasn’t disarmed again until Sunday the twenty-ninth at the time I just told you. At almost midnight.”

“Possibly on that Friday night it was she who went out. She went somewhere, possibly in her car. And the person who came back late on Sunday was someone else.”

“I’m with you so far.”

“Did you happen to notice if her garbage cans had anything in them?” I ask.

“Totally empty,” he says.

“Trash collection’s on Mondays,” I reply. “I’m wondering if this person emptied her refrigerator of perishables, took out the garbage, and rolled her super-can curbside.”

“Then rolled it back under the side porch?”

“Yes. Possibly when this same person cleaned out her mailbox and suspended her newspaper delivery.”

“Jesus. Who does that? Not some stranger.”

“She might not have been a stranger to him. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a stranger to her. I’m not saying their paths didn’t cross, but that doesn’t mean she was personal with him or even aware of him.” I think of everything Benton said about who we’re looking for. “What I’d like to do is get trace and latent prints started on her car first thing in the morning. In other words, a full-court press. Not just checking mileage and the GPS but checking everything. Can you come in?”

“With bells on.”

“And if you happen upon paperwork such as vet records or bills? Maybe something will have the cat’s name on it?”

“She could have one of those chips.”

“I’ll have her scanned at the vet’s office,” I reply. “Maybe Bryce can take her in tomorrow. We’ll see if there’s an ID number we can check with the National Pet Registry.”

I get off the phone, turning right on White Street, and feel terrible that I don’t know what to call her.

“I’m really sorry, but I can’t just call you ‘the cat,’” I say to her, and she purrs loudly. “If you could talk you could tell me who put you out of the house, what bad person did that. Not just a person who isn’t nice but an evil one, and I suspect you were scared of him because you sensed what he really is. A man nobody thinks twice about. But he’s cruel. And you picked up on it, didn’t you, when he let himself inside your house? You wouldn’t come up to him until he tricked you with those treats I saw on the counter?”

I stroke her flat-eared head, and she rubs her face against my palm.

“Or maybe you ran out the door. Maybe you fled. I’ll buy you a bag of treats. The same thing, salmon Greenies, because I know that’s what your mother bought for you, lots and lots of bags of them in a cupboard. And grain-free turkey and salmon, which I also saw in the kitchen, plenty of it. She made sure you were well fed, had lots of healthy things to eat, didn’t she? You don’t seem to have fleas, but I’ll give you a bath and get you cleaned up, so you’re probably going to be angry with me.”

It’s almost midnight as I pull into the Shaw’s supermarket parking lot, illuminated with tall light standards and bordered by bare trees moving in a wind that has died down considerably.

“I guess I could call you Shaw,
since this is our first outing together.” I park near the brick columned entrance. “I apologize I don’t know who you are exactly, and I don’t want you to worry, but I’m going to have to leave you in the car for a few minutes because I don’t have anything at home for a cat. Only things for a dog, his very boring fish diet and sweet-potato treats. An old greyhound named Sock who is very shy and probably will be afraid of you.”

I leave her wrapped in the towel in the driver’s seat, shut the door, and am pointing the remote to lock it when headlights blind me as another car turns in. For an instant I can’t see, and then a window rolls down and Sil Machado is grinning at me.

“Hey, what’s doing, Doc?”

“Cat shopping.” I walk over to his Crown Vic. “You following me?”

“We sure it’s really her cat?” He shifts the car into park and props an arm on the door frame. “And yeah. I’m following you. Somebody’s got to.”

“Logic would tell you it’s her cat. But I don’t know it for a fact. She certainly seems lost and homeless.” I look around at the almost empty lot, at someone rolling a shopping cart at the far end of it. “Are you coming inside?”

“Don’t need anything at the store,” he replies. “Just making sure you get home okay.”

It seems a strange thing for him to say.

“I know you’re used to riding around all over the place at all hours. But I’m just making sure,” he repeats.

“Do you know something I don’t?” I notice bags of evidence in the dark backseat, including those I collected.

“Someone who’s familiar with Cambridge, right?”

“Someone who’s familiar with her house, her neighborhood. Someone who made himself familiar, anyway.” I step back to look through the driver’s window of my SUV, making sure the cat’s okay.

She’s sitting up on the towel.

“Getting her mail out of the box, right? Maybe emptying her garbage and rolling out her can?” Machado looks at me, and he’s as serious and unyielding as granite. “So I’m thinking this guy’s way too comfortable around here. Knows when to get mail out of her box, probably at least once a week? Knows when garbage collection is. I hate what happened back there. I mean, Burke was out of bounds.”

“I don’t know how much mail she got.” I’m not going to discuss what he’s just brought up.

“Me and Marino ride Harleys together. Which is how we got in tight.” Machado stares past me. “He drops by with pizza, to have coffee, sometimes we meet up at the gym, a real good guy and respects the hell out of you. I had no idea. I mean, I don’t know what to say except I know what he feels about you. I know he’d take a bullet.”

“I’m assuming this person was getting her mail once a week or a couple times a month at an hour when he’s not likely to be seen. The obvious point would be he didn’t want to raise suspicions and have people looking for her while he still had her body, storing it wherever he did for months.” I’m not going to talk about Marino with him. “Do you have that keychain with you?”

“Okay, sure.” He reaches over the back of the seat and finds the brown paper bag.

He opens it and pulls out a smaller bag that has the car key inside it, and he hands it out the window to me.

“Never had a case where someone’s this brazen. Well, it’s not normal, Doc.”

“When is murder normal?” I hold the transparent bag up and illuminate it with the light from my phone.

“So you think it’s some sicko who lives in a sick fantasy world, but he looks like the average man on the street.”

“What do you think?” The car key is infrared, with a battery, the compass attached to it by a quick-key-release chain with a split ring at either end.

“Yeah, no doubt about it. Someone who blends. Someone no one thinks twice about.”

“A pull-apart key holder that looks fairly new.” I hand the bag back to him. “Connecting the key of an eighteen-year-old Mercedes to a compass that’s vintage.”

“Vintage meaning what? Like as old as the car?” He returns the plastic bag to the brown paper one.

“Meaning I think you’re going to find Girl Scouts haven’t used compasses like this one in recent memory. I’m going to guess at least fifty years.”

“You kidding me? So maybe it was Peggy Stanton’s.”

“She was forty-nine, so it was before her time, too, and it depends on where she got the compass or where someone did.” I check on the cat again. “An old compass, an old coin ring, and antique buttons sewn on the jacket she had on? Someone into history and collectibles, but who?”

“You go on in,” Machado says. “I’m going to wait and follow you home, just to make sure. I’d feel better.”

I head to the green awning over the entrance and go inside, rolling a cart to the aisle for pet supplies, where I find a litter box and scoop, and clumping litter, Wellness food and treats, and several toys. I find soothing oatmeal and flea shampoos and a nail trimmer, and when I return to my SUV and open the back door, Shaw is sitting on the backseat with her hind legs straight out, the way Scottish Folds sit, which is unlike the way any other cats sit.

“Come on.” I pick her up, conscious of Machado parked nearby with his headlights burning. “Let’s get you back in the towel and in my lap, okay?”

She doesn’t fight or resist me in the slightest as I drive home with Machado right behind me, and I wonder what he’s worried about. I can’t help but suspect he knows something he’s not saying, and maybe it’s related to Marino, but it seems impossible that Machado could think for even a minute that Marino has anything to do with Peggy Stanton’s death or a missing paleontologist. But it depends on what Machado’s been told, especially if Burke’s the one doing the telling.