The Bone Bed (24 page)

twenty-eight

I PULL IN BEHIND MY BUILDING AND CAN DETERMINE BY
the cars in the lot the key people who are here, the ones I will need. Luke and Anne, and Ernie, George and Cybil, and I notice Toby’s pickup truck. He’s on call tonight and is supposed to be off today. His red Tacoma is parked in an Investigation space next to the white Tahoe I was in yesterday, and I think of what Lucy said when we talked at one a.m.

She told me the reason she was still up at that hour, as if it required an explanation, is that she and Marino had been arguing rather fiercely. He refused to stay in her house and she refused to drive him to the CFC to get his car, and she wouldn’t drive him to his home in Cambridge, either. From that I inferred he’d been drinking or wasn’t to be trusted for one reason or another, and as she was telling me this I could hear someone in the background who wasn’t him.

The person was speaking in a low, quiet voice I couldn’t make out while Lucy went on to say that Marino finally agreed to stay in the stable, an outbuilding that really isn’t a stable anymore because she’s converted it into a washing and detailing bay with an underground firing range. Upstairs on the second floor is a guest quarters, an efficiency apartment, and she was moving about as she described this, and I couldn’t hear the other person anymore, and that probably was deliberate.

It’s been a while since I’ve been invited to Lucy’s country home, as she calls her sixty-some acres on the Sudbury River west of Boston, a horse farm she’s spent the past year renovating and retrofitting to handle her collection of gravity-defying machines, the barn converted into a monster garage, the paddock now a concrete helipad. Marino is
reasonably okay,
and I shouldn’t be worried, Lucy informed me, and the last time I knew she was dating anyone was in early summer, a person she rendezvoused with in Provincetown more than once.

Of course Marino’s upset. He’s angry, Lucy explained, and I couldn’t stop thinking of the gold signet ring she had on yesterday. I didn’t question her. I know when not to, but she seemed so uneasy and guarded, and it occurred to me that whatever she and Marino were fighting about may have nothing to do with the mess he’s in. Maybe he moved into the stable because of who she’s with, someone she doesn’t want to talk about, someone Marino doesn’t approve of, and he’s never hesitated to give Lucy his opinion about choices she’s made.

The CFC seems lonely, Marino’s absence a void that is palpable, and I enter my building through the bay. I don’t see Lucy’s car, whatever she’s decided to drive today, but by now she’s on her way here to help me with what I’ve asked. How to track an imposter on Twitter, and is it possible the person who sent me the video clip and image of a severed ear also pretended to be Peggy Stanton and tweeted Marino? It would seem unlikely, were it not for the timing, everything horrid happening all at once.

I unlock the door to the autopsy floor, pausing at the security desk to check the log. Five cases have come in since late last night, two possible drug ODs, a gunshot homicide, a sudden unexpected death in a parking lot, a pedestrian hit-and-run, the autopsies already under way. I told Luke to start without me and to make sure we discuss Howard Roth at some point. I want to review scene photographs, to examine his clothing and take a look at his body before it’s released. I want as much history as we can find because I don’t believe he got a flail chest from falling down his basement steps.

Through another door I go down a ramp, the evidence bay a walled-off windowless space where my staff are working, all of them in white Tyvek and face shields. They are covered from their scalps to the soles of their feet by the same water- and bacteria-proof flashspun polyethylene barrier used to wrap houses and commercial buildings and boats and cars and mail. Faces behind plastic and cocooned in a sheen of white, scarcely recognizable as people I know, barely people at all, making synthetic crinkly sounds as they move around.

They are setting up cyanoacrylate evaporators with fans and humidifiers around the 1995 pale yellow Mercedes sedan, its doors and trunk open wide, in an area of the bay where the lights have been dimmed. Trace evidence examiner Ernie Koppel has on orange goggles and is using the ALS on the driver’s seat, and I suit up and put on gloves. I ask him what’s been done so far.

“I wanted to go through it with a fine-toothed comb before we fume it,” he says, and while the hood covers his baldness it plumps up his already plump cheeks, his teeth and nose seeming unnaturally large. “You might want to put these on if you’re going to look.” He hands me goggles the same way he always does, as if I don’t know to put them on when using wavelengths that require filters.

Crouching by the open driver’s door, he moves the guide, what looks like a cone-shaped lamp attached to a black cord. He paints ultraviolet light over brown carpet that is stained and worn, and I wonder out loud if there might have been mats and someone removed them. Maybe the killer did when he returned the car to her garage, and I’m not the least bit hesitant about referring to a murderer even though I don’t know why Peggy Stanton is dead. I’ve already decided if toxicology turns up negative I will sign her out as a homicide with a cause of death that’s undetermined.

“There were no mats front or back when the car was brought in,” Ernie says. “I can’t answer if there ever were any, but I have a feeling maybe not based on what I’m seeing.” He directs the light to show me. “Mostly in this area.” He means the driver’s side of the front seat.

Fibers look like snippets of wire fluorescing white, orange, neon green, and rainbow blends as the UV light passes over them. Ernie reaches in with adhesive carbon tape stubs that he gives to me as he finishes with each one. I place them inside screw-cap vials, sealing them in bags I label with the location they were recovered from and other information Ernie gives to me.

“I already went over the back and the passenger’s side.” His coveralls and booties make plastic sounds, and intermittently his voice is muffled when he’s inside the car. “First with white light, then blue, just in case there’s fine blood spatter or gunshot residue. I tried green for latents. UV for semen, saliva, urine. There’s no evidence thus far that anything bad happened in this car. It’s dusty and lonely, if a car can be lonely, like an old person’s car.”

“She wasn’t old, but I think she lived like it.”

“I found what looks like some cat fur, grayish-white,” he says. “On the carpet in back where you might expect someone to put a pet carrier.”

“I’m reasonably sure she had a cat.” I need to talk to Bryce about that, about taking Shaw to the vet.

“It may have been her only passenger,” Ernie supposes. “Typical for what I see in a vehicle usually driven by one person, especially an older person. There’s a high concentration of fibers, hair, other debris transferred to the driver’s area and tracked in and ground into the carpet, which I could cut out, but I’d rather collect what’s obvious first. What I am noticing and what you’ll be most interested in is this stuff here.”

His gloved hand holds out another stub to me.

“You’ll need a lens to see what I’m talking about,” he says. “It doesn’t fluoresce because it’s absorbing the UV and looks black, pretty much like blood does, but it’s not blood. In normal light and under a lens it’s dark red. There’s a fair amount of it in the carpet near the brake and the accelerator, like someone had it on his shoes.”

I step away from the car and take off my goggles. Retrieving a magnifier from a cart, I examine the stub and agree with Ernie that blood wouldn’t look like this. The woody material is familiar.

“I’m thinking the stuff could be mulch,” he says.

“Do you know what kind of wood?”

“The chemical spectra for that may take a day or two. Assuming you want to know if all of it came from the same localized area, from the same tree, for example?”

George and Cybil from trace want to know when they can begin to set up the tent. It will completely enclose the car so no one is inhaling superglue fumes or is exposed to them. I tell them not quite yet.

“To determine that degree of specificity? Well, it depends on the uptake from soil, various elements in it; we are what we eat. It’s true of everything, even trees,” Ernie is saying from inside the Mercedes, and I know he’s thinking about what I recovered from Peggy Stanton’s body.

The fibrous red material on the bottom of her feet and under her nails looks identical to what he’s finding inside her car.

“If you want that level of detail, I might have to send a sample to a lab where they specialize in wood analysis.” He continues painting UV inside the Mercedes. “It goes without saying in trace amounts like this you can’t exactly count the rings.”

“I’d settle for type of tree. Pine, redwood, cypress, cedar. It does look a lot like mulch.”

Soft-sided carrying cases are set down close to me, scientists unpacking the cyanoacrylate monomer and cabling.

“Hardwood shredded mulch as opposed to mulch made from bark,” I specify.

“There’s no bark I can see,” Ernie tells me.

“Sort of like shredded wheat,” I describe, as I look at it. “Fibrous, hairy. Almost like cotton. Not milled like wood that’s sawed or cut with machines. But extremely fine. Without magnification it almost looks like soil, like dirt, like fine coffee grounds. Only dark red.”

“No, it’s not milled. It’s totally irregular. A red-colored mulch, and usually mulch is made from scrap pallets and other wood that’s chip-ground.” His head is ducked in the driver’s side. “Not popular with a lot of people, because it bleeds in the rain and the dye masks treated lumber, which you don’t want in your yard, certainly not near your vegetable garden. Recycled CCA, chromated copper arsenate, and whatever this stuff is, it doesn’t have a trace of CCA, that much I can say. Assuming it’s the same stuff you found on the body. I did find iron oxide, which could be from a dye or from good ole dirt.”

I tell him it would be very helpful if he could examine what he’s finding inside her car, to do it as quickly as possible. It might be quite important, I add, and he promises when he gets back to his lab he’ll take a look with the stereomicroscope, the polarized light scope, the Raman spectrometer.

He’s confident he’s going to find the same chemical fingerprint, he explains, the same interference colors and same birefringence he saw when he took a look at the reddish material I collected from Peggy Stanton’s body.

“Red-stained wood but not stained all the way through.” I study another stub he hands to me. “If it were ground up and sprayed with dye, would it look like this?”

“Maybe. I do know when I examined what Dr. Zenner submitted to me yesterday, I noted that some of the fibers are charred,” Ernie says. “And that I don’t necessarily expect to find in mulch. But it completely depends on what it’s made from. Scrap wood from a torn-down building where there may have been a fire, for example? I also found charcoal and a lot of minerals mixed in.”

“The question is whether the charcoal, the minerals are indigenous to this mulchlike material or are from dirt on a floor or carpet.”

“That’s exactly the question.” Ernie stands up and straightens his back as if it’s stiff. “You start looking at the world through a microscope and you see salt, silica, iron, arsenic, insect pieces and parts, skin cells, hair, fibers, a holy horror.”

“It certainly appears he drove her car.” I feel sure of it. “Wherever he took her must have this reddish debris on the floor, on the ground.”

“Maybe a landscaping business or an area where a lot of red-colored mulch is used. Golf courses, apartment complexes, a park. Or maybe a place they manufacture mulch. Did you see anything like this around her house?”

“No. She stepped in it wherever he took her, and he did, too, and he tracked it into her car. This splintery material would work its way into clothing, carpet, skin, hair, and stick to everything like Velcro.”

“Some synthetic fibers on the leather seats,” he lets me know as he looks. “Probably from clothing, and a fair amount of white hair everywhere.”

“Her hair was white. Long. Shoulder length.”

“A little bit of these same wooden fibers.” He finds more of them. “Possibly transferred from clothing. Hers or some other person’s.” He turns a knob on the ALS’s panel, changing wavelengths, and the light turns green-blue.

I put my goggles back on, the orange filter blocking light not absorbed by the evidence, and I return to the car. Ernie is painting the steering wheel, the dash, the console, and the seat belt’s metal buckle and tongue, areas that will be swabbed for DNA next. Some smudges light up, nothing discernible, no latent prints we can do anything with, and I’m not surprised.

Maybe we’ll get lucky when the car is fumed inside and out with cyanoacrylate, better known as superglue, but I don’t want to get my hopes up. I can’t imagine a killer driving Peggy Stanton’s Mercedes or exploring her house and not wearing gloves or covering his hands or wiping things down after the fact, but I also know better than to project what I think onto someone else. Bad people can be incredibly stupid, especially arrogant ones who have never been caught and aren’t in a database.

“I always feel like the abominable snowman in this damn stuff,” Sil Machado complains, as he walks up. “Or maybe the Pillsbury Doughboy.”

Ernie explains what we’ve found as another text message lands on my phone. A third one from Lucy, who wants to see me upstairs.

“I saw nothing like that anywhere inside her house,” Machado lets Ernie know. “Not in the basement. Not in the garage. Not in her yard. No red mulch. Not even old mulch. You got a minute?” he says to me. “Actually, I’m going to need more than one.”

“I was just heading up to take care of a few things,” I reply. “Come on.”

twenty-nine

HE SAYS HE WOULD HAVE GOT HERE SOONER, BUT LUKE
called him earlier this morning, asking questions about Howard Roth. Apparently, Luke told Sil Machado it was urgent.

“Did he explain why?” I walk us through the evidence bay.

“Yeah, he said you don’t think Howie fell down the stairs.”

“Howie?”

“What people called him,” Machado replies.

“I’m not suggesting he didn’t go down the stairs. I’m suggesting he might have had some help,” I clarify. “His injuries aren’t consistent with a typical fall.”

“Dr. Zenner said you think maybe somebody beat the shit out of him.”

I hope Luke didn’t say it like that, and I take off the Tyvek and drop it in the trash.

“So I shot right back over to his place.” Machado yanks off his coveralls, booties, and gloves, as if he hates them. “And I admit I didn’t look through things the first time thinking homicide. But if ever there was an obvious scenario I’ve seen? A known drunk has an accident and there’s blood on the steps he fell down, I’m telling you, Doc, I don’t make assumptions. But this was straightforward. I’m still blown away you’re thinking he might be a homicide.”

“Who found him?”

“A buddy, a guy who works maintenance at Fayth House just a few blocks away. Said he had the day off, dropped by for a beer. Apparently, Howie did some odd jobs over there. General labor, when he was sober enough.”

Machado hands me a transparent plastic bag that has a check inside it. I again press the button for the elevator, which seems to be stuck on my floor.

“This was in his toolbox. I didn’t look the first time because he’s an alcoholic who fell down the stairs into the basement, right? I mean, that’s where his body was found. He was in his underwear like he’d been in bed. And he’s got scratches, a gash on his head, broke ribs, is banged up like he went down the steps, and like I said, there’s blood on them and at the bottom of them.”

Peggy Stanton’s choice of a design for her personal checks is folk art reminiscent of Charles Wysocki Americana, a brick house with a white picket fence, a horse and buggy going past.

“Every indication is he took a fall so there was no reason for me to go rooting around inside an old toolbox,” Machado says. “Not unless I was looking for something in particular, which I wasn’t at first.”

“He may have gone down the stairs, but he may have been injured first,” I reiterate, and now I’m more convinced of it because of the check.

It’s handwritten in black ink, made out to Howard Roth for one hundred dollars.

“I don’t think it’s likely the fall is what killed him,” I add. “He died from hemorrhage and possibly respiratory distress caused by blunt trauma so severe segments of his rib cage separated from his chest wall with as many as two to four fractures per rib. He has severe underlying lung injury.”

The check’s memo blank has been filled in with “home repairs.”

“He has blunt-force trauma to the back of his head. Do we know how he really got that?” I ask.

“Couldn’t hitting concrete steps do all of it?”

“I’m very concerned,” I tell Machado, as we wait for the elevator to budge from the top floor. “More so now that there’s a connection between Peggy Stanton and him.”

“Easy to imagine. The basement door right next to the bathroom.” He’s not going to stop defending his initial belief that Howard Roth is an alcohol-related accident. “I figure he gets up in the middle of the night? Drunk. Opens the wrong door, and one small step for man, one huge tumble.”

Printed in the check’s upper-left corner is the bank account holder’s name,
Mrs. Victor R. Stanton.

“Where was the toolbox?” I ask.

There’s no address or telephone number on the check, and I continue looking at it. I can’t take my eyes off it.

“Oh, geez, Doc. You got to picture it in your head, okay? This old run-down place, really small, a real shit can.”

“I’m going to need to review the scene photographs.”

Her signature is
Peggy Stanton,
and it’s not a good forgery.

“A dark pit, a dump,” Machado is saying. “One naked lightbulb and six concrete steps leading down, with a rope for a railing. The toolbox was down there. I guess he carried the check around with him in his toolbox.”

“He’s making the rounds in Cambridge. Maybe stopping by her place because he wanted his money. Obviously he never cashed the check.” I tap-tap the button for the elevator, which hasn’t moved, someone holding open the door, no doubt.

My impatience reminds me of Marino.

“Fayth House is a residential nursing home,” I then say. “It might be worth checking on whether Peggy Stanton did any volunteer work there. It could be how she connected with him and why she would have trusted him to do an occasional job for her. A hundred dollars isn’t insignificant. I’d say he did more than rake her yard or unclog a drain.”

I think of the substandard wiring that was recently done in her basement as the elevator takes forever to descend.

“What else do we know about him?” I ask.

“Apparently, he was a mechanic in the Army. Served in Iraq when we first went over there, and didn’t do so good after the fact. Came home with a traumatic brain injury, a TBI from an explosive blast. Was discharged, moved back into his Cambridge house, couldn’t hold a job, wife left him seven years ago. A lot of drinking.”

“His STAT alcohol was point-one-six,” I repeat what Luke told me over the phone earlier, our discussion about his problematic case quite brief and frustrating.

Neither Machado nor Luke took the case as seriously as I wish they had, because it seemed so obvious.

“His level of intoxication would have made him more vulnerable to anyone who wanted to hurt him,” I add. “If he’s cirrhotic, he’s also going to bleed excessively. I’ve not gone over his autopsy findings in detail yet. But I will.”

“He pretty much drank up his pension every month and made money any way he could,” Machado says. “All these garbage bags in his house, nothing much else, just bag after bag like a hoarder. Filled with cans, bottles that he obviously was turning in for money, probably digging through trash cans, taking them out of peoples’ recycling bins that they leave curbside.”

The check is dated this past June first, and I tell Machado I seriously doubt Peggy Stanton was still alive then.

“If she was,” I add, “she wasn’t in her own house, since it appears the last time it was accessed was April twenty-ninth, according to the alarm log.”

“Obviously someone was able to get enough of her information to impersonate her. Must have stolen some of her blank checks, got her PIN number for the ATM because there are some cash withdrawals, nothing abnormal but enough so you think she’s alive and well. He got the code to her alarm, who knows what all? Any signs of torture?” he asks, as the elevator doors finally slide open.

“She has some strange brownish areas that I’m not sure about.” I describe them. “No obvious injuries or marks I’d immediately associate with torture. But not everything leaves a mark.”

“Probably just scared the shit out of her and she told him whatever he wanted, believing he wouldn’t hurt her.”

“Did you talk to Howard Roth’s wife?” We ride up in what Marino calls “the slowest boat in China.”

“Yesterday. She came down here and ID’d a photograph, and I talked to her for a while and then called her back as I was driving here. Apparently, he’s a regular in Cambridge. In fact, I think I’ve seen him walking around, and a couple of guys I work with know about him. Doing the odd job, a pretty decent handyman, and honest, harmless, according to the ex. But she couldn’t stay with a drunk,” Machado says. “No car. Driver’s license is expired. A real sad case.”

I return the envelope to him, and he verifies that personal checks and checkbooks he found inside Peggy Stanton’s house are like this one, exactly like it, he says.

“That’s the other thing I find really interesting,” he adds. “She had all her bank statements in a file drawer, you know, with all her canceled checks? Years’ worth of them, but only through this past April.”

“Because someone began intercepting her mail.” We get out on the seventh floor, where Toby seems to be having difficulty pushing a cart loaded with boxes. “Are you considering that Howard Roth killed her?”

“It’s always smart to consider everything. But it wouldn’t make sense to think he had anything to do with it.”

“He had something to do with it even if he wasn’t aware of it,” I reply, as we follow the corridor toward the computer lab. “Are you the one holding the elevator door open forever?” I say to Toby, when we get to him.

“Sorry about that. I’m having trouble with a stuck wheel, then it turned over when I was pushing it out.”

“I thought you were off today.”

“Well, with Marino not here, I thought it was good to come in.” He’s not looking me in the eye and I notice the boxes are computer supplies.

Machado and I walk off, and I comment, “It says a lot that she continued using her husband’s name when he’s been dead thirteen years.”

Toby pushes the cart behind us, stopping every few steps to straighten out the wheel.

“Maybe she didn’t want people to know she lived alone,” Machado supposes. “My girlfriend’s like that, doesn’t have her address or phone numbers on her checks. Doesn’t want her information out there so someone can just show up at her door, doesn’t want strangers calling. Of course, being with me and hearing all my stories about what goes on has made her a little paranoid.”

“Why do you think he didn’t cash the check? Based on your description, he could use every penny he got.”

“I’m betting he tried and couldn’t,” Machado says. “A handyman who basically would go around Cambridge collecting bottles and cans, doing anything anybody might hire him for. I seriously doubt people paid him with checks.”

We walk through Lucy’s open door, and she’s at her desk, surrounded by large flat-screen monitors, and Toby pushes the cart in after us. He begins stacking the boxes against the wall.

“You want these anyplace special?” he asks her.

“Just leave them.” She says it like an order, staring at him.

“Raking leaves, yard work, home repairs, even electrical, and he’s not licensed in anything, according to his ex-wife. Probably paid in cash,” Machado is saying to me.

“He probably wasn’t mailing invoices to people,” I point out.

“No sign of anything like that in his house.”

“Then why did she owe Howard Roth money? Why didn’t she pay him at the time he did the work? Maybe it was for a job he hadn’t finished?” I suggest.

“I’m thinking what you are,” Machado says. “The work in the basement. Nothing hooked up yet. Maybe he drops by a couple times to finish and no one’s answering the door. Maybe he leaves a note in her mailbox.”

“Maybe.”

“And whoever is impersonating her sends him a check. The perp had to have his address.” Machado’s talking to me and looking at Lucy.

“Howard Roth, forty-two years old, died over the weekend at his central Cambridge home.” She reads what she’s just pulled up. “Bateman Street. You can Google it.”

“So maybe that’s how, and he gets the check in the mail,” Machado says. “He has no account at Peggy Stanton’s bank and nothing that might inspire a teller to hand over a hundred bucks to him.”

“Her bank would have her signature card on file, and it’s not a great forgery.” I sit next to Lucy.

“I agree with you there.”

Machado pulls up a chair and unzips his briefcase.

“If you put her signature and this one side by side?”

He slides out two plastic bags, and Toby is taking his time.

“So maybe some teller pulled up her signature card and got a bad feeling, wouldn’t cash it for him, plus his driver’s license isn’t valid, like I said. And that might be what the bank was calling about,” Machado says. “There are a couple messages on her answering machine from Wells Fargo, asking her to call. First one in early June, about the time the check was mailed to Howie.”

“How do you know it was mailed?” Lucy scans information scrolling by on every screen, what I recognize as files her search engines are finding.

I can’t tell what they are. I can’t decipher what I’m seeing, and that’s deliberate, because I’m not alone.

“What’s called the power of deduction.” Machado continues looking at my niece as if she might not be a waste of his time.

She’s in faded jeans, a long-sleeved white T-shirt that is tight and could use ironing, and tactical boots. I’m aware of the big ring on her index finger as she moves the wireless mouse. I smell her cologne, and I can tell when she wants people to leave us alone because she has something important on her mind.

“If someone stole her identity,” Machado is saying, “then this person wasn’t going to show up at Howie’s house and hand him a check, right? Safest thing would be to mail it. My guess is it’s the same thing this person was doing with her other bills. Forging checks and mailing them, and the bank probably wasn’t going to question checks made out to the gas, electric, and telephone companies. But they might pull up her signature card when someone walks in and looks like a homeless person.”

“It’s not a good forgery, hardly a serious attempt at it,” Lucy says.

I have two transparent plastic bags side by side, the check Howard Roth never cashed, and an earlier canceled one that Machado found in a file of bank statements inside Peggy Stanton’s house.

“Not signed but written or basically drawn.” She moves close to me, her eyes locked on Toby as he finally leaves.

“I didn’t realize she was a handwriting expert,” Machado says, and now he’s openly flirting with my niece.

“I don’t have to be an expert.” She gets up and shuts her door, and Machado watches her as if she’s a tartar. “Somebody lousy.”

“Maybe he got better at it,” I reply. “June first was early on.”

Lucy sits back down. “Since when is Toby in charge of mail?”

“I sent Bryce on an errand,” I reply. “He’s taking Shaw to the vet. In fact, I’m hoping he’ll fall in love with her and decide Indy needs a sister.”

“The shaft of the letter
P
?” Lucy slides the plastic bags closer.