The Bone Bed (29 page)

thirty-four

I FAULT HIM FOR NOT MAKING AN APPOINTMENT AND
then showing up unannounced at the CFC, but I can’t say he has no right to talk to me. I decide that Channing Lott and his companions are to be brought upstairs.

“Just give me a minute to get settled,” I instruct Bryce over my cell phone. “Take them into the break room, get them water, coffee. I can see them for a few minutes only. Please explain I’m late for a meeting. I’ll text you when I’m ready, and you can bring them to my office.”

I push the elevator button for the seventh floor and know what Benton is going to insist on, but it’s out of the question.

“Kay, I should be with you—” he begins, and I don’t let him finish.

I shake my head. “It’s no more appropriate for you to sit in on whatever he wants to discuss than it would be if he were any family member, any other loved one of the deceased. He’s the husband of someone whose case is mine.”

“Her body’s not been found. She’s not your case.”

“I’ve been consulted about her, and he knows it. I’ve testified about her in his trial, and in his mind she’s my case. She has to be somebody’s case, for God’s sake, because it’s highly improbable she’s still alive. Let’s face it, she’s no more alive than Emma Shubert is.”

“You can’t make that connection based on fact.” The way he says it is revealing.

“I know when people aren’t going to walk through a door ever again, Benton.” I study him carefully. “Those women are dead.”

He says nothing because he believes it, too. He knows more than he’s saying. I think of the meeting I’m about to be quite late for, but whatever is happening will have to wait.

“What if Channing Lott really didn’t have anything to do with his wife’s disappearance and people like me won’t talk to him?” I ask.

“People like you?”

“I have to, Benton.”

“This is dangerous, Kay.”

“We’re obliged to respect that he’s been acquitted of her murder for hire, and what’s dangerous is to assume he’s not grieving, not distraught, not devastated.” I’m firm. It’s not negotiable. “I won’t have the FBI sitting in. In fact, the FBI has interfered with my office enough.”

“I’m not trying to interfere. I’m trying to protect you.”

“I know you are.” I look at him and can see how unhappy he is. “And I can’t allow it.”

He realizes when arguing will be fruitless, and while I always listen to his opinions and what he warns me about, I have to handle my responsibilities the way I know is right. If I weren’t his wife he’d never make the suggestion he just did. Inside the CFC there are no suspects, no innocent or guilty, only people dead or desolate. Channing Lott is the bereft, and to ignore him would be a violation of what I’m sworn to do.

“He’s not going to hurt me,” I say to Benton. “He’s not going to attack me inside my own building.”

“I’m not worried about what he’s going to do,” he says. “I’m worried about what he wants.”

“I’ll meet you and your colleagues in a few minutes. I’ll be fine.”

We get off on my floor, and I watch Benton walk away, tall and lank in his dark suit, his hair thick and silver, his stride purposeful and confident, the way he always walks, but I feel his reluctance. He heads toward the TelePresence conference room, which is referred to as the war room, and I go the other way.

I follow the curved corridor to my office and unlock the door, taking a moment to inspect myself in the mirror over the bathroom sink, to wash my face, brush my hair and teeth, and put on lipstick. Of all days to wear a pair of shapeless old corduroys and what looks like a fisherman’s cable-knit sweater, and plain black ankle boots.

It’s not what I would have picked, had I known I was meeting this notoriously powerful man who many still believe orchestrated the murder of his wife, and for an instant I consider changing into investigative field clothes, cargo pants, a shirt with the CFC crest. But that’s silly, and there isn’t time.

I text Bryce and ask him to please remind our uninvited guests it will have to be quick, that I’m late for another meeting. I don’t mind making the FBI wait, truth be told, especially making Douglas Burke wait; I wouldn’t mind making her wait for a hundred years. But I want an out if I need it. I don’t know what Channing Lott has planned or why he’s brought people with him.

I hear Bryce in the corridor being his usual hyperfluent self, and he can’t help it. His need to talk is like his need for air. He opens my door as he’s knocking on it, and Channing Lott is there in a dove-gray suit and gray shirt with no tie. He is quite striking, with his long white hair braided in back, and he shakes my hand warmly and looks me in the eye, and for an instant I think he’s going to hug me. It takes a moment to regain my composure and recognize the man and woman accompanying him.

“We can sit here.” I show them to the brushed-steel table. “I see Bryce made sure you have something to drink.”

“This is Shelly Duke, my chief financial officer, and Albert Galbraith, my chief of operations,” Lott says, and I remember the two of them huddled close and looking at the harbor outside the courthouse when I was going through security yesterday afternoon.

Attractive, well-paid executives finely dressed, in their late thirties, early forties, I would guess, neither of them as warm or friendly as their boss, whose blue eyes are intense, his face vibrant as he gives me his complete attention. When we are seated, I ask him what I might help him with.

“First and most important, I want to thank you, Dr. Scarpetta.” Lott says what I was afraid he might. “What you were put through couldn’t have been a good time.” He means what happened in court, and I’m reminded unpleasantly of being fined by the judge and Lott’s own attorney attempting to impeach me on every front.

“There is nothing to thank me for, Mr. Lott,” I reply, as I think of his helicopter filming me. “I’m a public servant doing my job.”

“Without prejudice,” he says. “You did it without preconception or prejudice. You simply stated what was true, and you didn’t have to.”

“It’s not my job to take sides or have an opinion unless it’s about why someone has died.”

“That’s not my wife,” he says, and Peggy Stanton’s identity hasn’t yet been released. “When they played the TV footage in court, I knew it wasn’t her. I knew it instantly, and I wanted to tell you myself in the event there’s been a question.”

I wonder if Toby leaked the identity to Jill Donoghue and if she knows her client is here.

“As grim as the condition of the body seemed to be, I could tell without hesitation it’s not Millie.” Lott removes the cap from a bottle of water. “She couldn’t possibly look like that, and if you’ve been through her medical records or been given details of her physical description, you’ll realize what I’m saying is correct.”

I have little doubt he knows I’ve been through those records and am aware that Mildred Lott is or was almost six feet tall. Peggy Stanton, whose murder Channing Lott shouldn’t know about unless he had something to do with it or his lawyer’s been told, was barely five-foot-three. When she was visible on TV as I was getting her body into the Stokes basket, it was obvious she wasn’t tall. I know from examining her that her hair was white, not dyed blond, and that she had no scars from recent cosmetic surgeries, an abdominoplasty, a rhytidectomy.

“It was the first thing all of us thought when it hit the news.” Al Galbraith reaches for his coffee, and he seems disquieted, as if the subject is a distasteful one. “No matter the condition, someone doesn’t get shorter,” he says awkwardly, as if he feels compelled to say something about his boss’s missing wife.

“Postmortem changes, changes after death, don’t make someone shorter,” I agree.

“An imposing woman,” Galbraith says, and it flickers in my mind he didn’t like her. “I think anybody who met Mrs. Lott was struck by how statuesque she was.”

“Exactly,” Shelly Duke agrees, and it occurs to me that they don’t want to be here. “A stunning, overwhelming woman. She filled a room, just dominated it when she walked in, and I mean it in the best way,” she adds, with sadness that is unconvincing.

Lott has made them come. They are as unsettled as one might expect them to be inside a forensic facility, sitting down with me and discussing someone I sense they had ambivalence about. I wonder if Jill Donoghue has masterminded this unscheduled meeting, but I can’t imagine a motive. She has boldly stated that there will be no double jeopardy in this case, that her client won’t be tried again for the same charge or anything similar.

This nightmare is over but not the worst one,
Donoghue has been telling the media since the acquittal was announced this morning. Now Channing Lott gets to deal with his own victimization, because he’s the real victim here, she’s been saying, jailed for a crime he didn’t commit, as if the tragic loss of his wife wasn’t horrific enough.

“Dr. Scarpetta, might I ask you a question?” He is completely focused on me, sitting very straight and turned in a way that tells me why his two chief executive officers are with him.

He gives them his back and doesn’t look to either one for anything. They are witnesses, not trusted friends. Lott didn’t achieve what he has in life by being naïve or stupid. Even as I worry about his intentions, he’s ensuring I won’t be the one causing trouble.

“I can’t promise I’ll be able to answer, but go ahead.” I recall what the Gloucester detectives Lorey and Kefe said when they met with me after Mildred Lott vanished.

“You know the details, I assume. Millie was home alone in our Gloucester place on March eleventh, a Sunday,” Lott says, as if he’s making an opening statement.

A vain woman who courted the rich and famous and had visited the White House more than once and had even met the Queen, the detectives described to me, and when I asked if they knew of anyone who might have wanted something bad to happen to Mildred Lott, they said to get out the phone book and point.

Point to any page, they said. Could be anyone she’d ever stepped on, overworked, or underpaid, or had treated like
the help
, they claimed, and I remember thinking at the time how common it is that victims aren’t likable. No one deserves to be abducted, raped, murdered, robbed, or maimed, but that doesn’t mean the person didn’t deserve something.

“She’d just relocated us back to Gloucester. We keep the house closed during the bleakest months of winter,” Lott repeats what he obviously has said many times before. “And I’d spoken to her at what was morning for me and about nine p.m. for her, and of course she was very upset. I was away on business in Asia and in fact had decided to cut short my trip because of the dog. Millie was a wreck.”

“She may not know about Jasmine,” Shelly Duke prompts him. “Their dog,” she says to me.

“Our shar-pei vanished on March eighth,” Lott explains. “The landscapers left the gate open again. It had happened before and Jasmine got out. Last time she was found frantic and lost, the police spotted her. The local police know her and an officer picked her up and brought her back to us. Then we weren’t so fortunate, it seemed at first. Police suspected someone stole her, a rare purebred, a miniature and not inexpensive, and Millie was beside herself. There aren’t words to describe how upset she was.” Channing Lott blinks back tears.

“Your dog vanished three days before your wife did,” I say to him.

“Yes.” He clears his throat.

“Did Jasmine ever show up?”

“Two days after Millie disappeared, Jasmine was found wandering several miles north of our house, close to the Annisquam River,” he says, and I think of Peggy Stanton’s cat. “In an off-leash walking area with a lot of brush and boulders above Wheeler Street. Some people out with their dog found her.”

“Do you think she’d been loose the entire time she was missing?” I ask.

“Couldn’t have been, not for the better part of a week in the rainy raw weather, down in the low forties at night, without food or water. She was in too good of shape to have been out that entire time. I think whoever took her changed his mind. Jasmine can be aggressive, unpredictable, isn’t fond of strangers.”

Someone who has no regard for human life but wouldn’t harm an animal.

“The Ransom of Red Chief.” Channing Lott’s laughter is hollow, and what is significant to me is the chronology.

Most likely Peggy Stanton’s cat got out or was put out after her owner had disappeared and possibly already was dead, yet Mildred Lott’s dog vanished before any crime had occurred.

“It’s been suggested that my wife might have drowned accidentally.” He gets around to asking my opinion about that, and I can’t possibly have an answer. “Or maybe took her own life.”

He goes on to describe the theories, which have been endless and far-fetched, some of them recited by Donoghue in court. Mildred Lott was drunk or on drugs and wandered outside and fell into the ocean or deliberately went into the frigid water to drown herself. She was having an affair and ran off with whoever it was because she feared her husband’s wrath. She’d been stashing millions of dollars in offshore accounts and is now living under an assumed identity in the Caribbean, on the Mediterranean, in the South of France, in Marrakech. Alleged sightings of her have been all over the Internet.

“I’m interested in your opinion.” He presses me for one. “A person drowns either accidentally or is murdered or commits suicide? Wouldn’t the body turn up eventually?”

“Bodies in water aren’t always found,” I reply. “People lost at sea, people who go overboard from ships or get pulled under or swept away by strong currents, for example. Depending on whether the body gets hung up on something—”

“Eventually there would be absolutely nothing left?”

“Whatever is left has to be found, and it isn’t always.”

“But if my wife fell into the ocean, perhaps stumbled over rocks or fell off our dock, wouldn’t you expect her to show up?” He persists bravely and not easily.

His eyes are bright with sorrow that seems real.

“In a case like that, generally, yes,” I answer.

“Al, if you would?” Lott says, without looking at him.

Al Galbraith opens his briefcase and withdraws a manila envelope he pushes across the table to me, and I don’t open it. I don’t touch it. I won’t until I know exactly what it is and whether it is something I should see.