The Bone Bed (4 page)

“Next thing what, Benton? I go to bed with him? That’s the logical conclusion if I mentor people and am their de facto mother?” I didn’t add that I don’t sleep with my niece, either.

“You want him. You want someone younger. It happens as we get older, it always does, because we hold on to vitality, fight for it and want it back. That’s the problem; it will always be a problem and gets only worse. And young men want you because you’re a trophy.”

“I’ve never thought of myself as a trophy.”

“And maybe you’re bored.”

“I’ve never been bored with you, Benton.”

“I didn’t say with me,” he said.

I walk through the beige epoxy-painted bay, the size of a small hangar, and it crosses my mind as it has a number of times this past week that I don’t feel I’m bored with my job or my life, and not with Benton, never with him. It’s not possible to be bored with such a complex elegant man, whom I’ve always found strikingly compelling and impossible to own, a part of him inaccessible no matter how intimate we could ever be.

But it is true that I notice other attractive human beings, and certainly I notice them noticing me, and since I’m not as young as I was, maybe noticing has become more important. But it’s simply not true that I don’t have insight about it, I certainly do, am insightful enough to know that it’s damn harder for women. It’s hard in ways men will never understand, and I hate being reminded of our fight and how it ended, which was with Benton’s assertion that I’m not honest with myself.

It occurs to me that the person I could be completely honest with is the one who inadvertently caused the problem, Anna Zenner, my confidante of old, who used to tell me stories of her nephew, Luka, or Luke, as the rest of us know him. He left Austria for public school in England, then Oxford, and after that King’s College London School of Medicine, and eventually made his way to America, where he completed his forensic pathology residency at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore, one of the finest facilities anywhere. He came highly recommended and had many prestigious job offers, and I’ve had no trouble with him and can’t see why anyone would question his credentials or feel I hired him as a favor.

The roll-up bay door is retracted, and through the concrete space and out the big square opening is the tarmac and the clean blue sky. Cars and CFC vehicles, all of them white, shine in the fall morning light, and enclosing the lot is the black PVC-coated anti-climb fence, and over the top of it, rising above my titanium-skinned building on two sides, are brick-and-glass MIT labs with radar dishes and antennas on the roofs. To the west is Harvard and its divinity school near my house, which of course I can’t make out above the barricade of dense dark fencing that keeps the world away from those I take care of, my patients, all of them dead.

I emerge onto the tarmac as a white Tahoe rumbles toward me. The air is cool and clear like glass, and I pull on my jacket, grateful that Bryce chose my attire for the day. I’m reminded of how unexpected it is that I’ve grown accustomed to a chief of staff who cares about my wardrobe. I’ve come to like what at first I resisted, although his attending to me encourages forgetfulness on my part, a complete disinterest in relatively unimportant details he can easily manage or fix. But he was right, I will need the jacket because it will be cold on the boat and there’s a very good chance I will get wet. If anyone has to go into the water, it will be me. I’m already convinced of that.

I will insist on seeing for myself exactly what we’re dealing with and making sure the death is managed the way it should be, precisely and respectfully, beyond reproach and in anticipation of any legal accusations, because there are always those. Marino can help me or not, but he’s no diver and doesn’t do well in a wetsuit or a drysuit, says they make him feel as if he’s suffocating, and he isn’t much of a swimmer. He can stay on the boat, and I will take care of things on my own. I’m not going to squabble with him or anyone. I’ve had my fill of squabbling and worrying about the slightest thing that can be misinterpreted. As if I would have an affair with Anna Zenner’s nephew, who, even if I were single, would be far more compatible with Lucy, were she inclined that way.

I’m not Luke’s de facto mother, and what continues to cut me to the bone about Benton’s remark is the suggestion that I’m old.

Old like a Eurostile font evocative of a past era, the fifties and sixties, which I scarcely can recall and don’t want to believe I’m from.

I feel Benton’s implication like an internal injury that chronically smarts, a depressing symptom of being damaged and not knowing it until he spoke those angry words to me in Vienna. I’ve perceived myself differently since he said it, and I’m not sure I can get over the deeper wounding it has done.

six

I FLIP UP THE HINGED BOX COVER OF THE BIOMETRIC
reader mounted on the side of the building and lightly press my left thumb against the glass scanner. The torque motor purrs, and steel roller chains noisily begin lowering the half-ton sectional shutter bay door.

“The Coast Guard should have drysuits,” I say to Marino, as I settle into the Tahoe’s front passenger’s seat, and I know him.

He picked whatever was most recently washed and filled with gas, which likely was what Luke Zenner observed when he noticed Marino scouting out various vehicles in the parking lot. I smell the pleasant scent of Armor All and notice the dash is glossy, the carpet spotless. Marino likes a V8 engine, the bigger and louder a vehicle the better, and I’m reminded of how much he loathes the new fleet of SUVs I picked, Toyota Sequoias, fuel-efficient, practical, what I drive every day because I don’t need to prove anything to anyone.

“We always keep a couple drysuits in the storage lockers. I make sure of it with every scene truck.” Marino reminds me of his diligence, and I sense an unpleasant conversation coming on. “There’s two in back. I checked.”

“Good.” I fasten my shoulder harness and find my sunglasses as he backs up. “But hopefully whatever the Coast Guard has on board is better than ours, which isn’t saying much. The suits we have are pretty awful, intended for very basic search and rescue, and not evidence recovery.”

“Government surplus,” Marino complains, and he has something on his mind.

I can always tell.

“Crap that’s the lowest bid for Homeland Security or DoD, and then they don’t want it and it gets passed down the line at a deal,” he says. “Like those cartons for organ sections that said
Fish Bait
? Back in our Richmond days? Remember?”

“It’s not exactly something one could forget.”

Marino started tweeting, maybe started drinking again, not long after I hired Luke, and I wonder if Luke said something to him in the parking lot a few minutes ago. I wonder if Luke asked where we were going and added the reminder that he is PADI trained and certified at a professional level, is a master instructor and rescue diver.

“Because you needed a shitload of plasticized cartons and it went out on bid?” Marino remembers fondly.

“And we used them, had no choice.”

“Yeah, if that happened now a defense attorney would have a field day with it.”

I think of Mildred Lott and what I likely face. Court is still on for me, as far as I know. If only I had been more careful. If only I hadn’t made a damn stupid comment that I fear will soon be all over the news.

“We may not need to go in at all unless she’s no longer close to the surface.” Marino stops the Tahoe at the black metal security gate. “In the photo Pam sent it looks like she’s within easy reach. Probably we can just pull the lines in and won’t even need a drysuit, but who the shit knows.”

“We shouldn’t assume it’s a she.”

“Nail polish.” He splays his hands as if he’s wearing it, then reaches up to the visor and pushes a button on the remote. “You could see it in the pic Pam sent.” He refers to the young-looking marine biologist as if they are instant friends. “Definitely nail polish. I couldn’t tell what color, though, maybe pink.”

“It’s best not to assume anything at all.”

“Well, we need our own damn dive team. I’ve been thinking about it, thinking of getting certified,” he says, and that will never happen.

Marino likes to comment that if God meant for us to breathe underwater he would have given us gills. He said it for Luke to hear, and I wonder if Marino has a clue that Luke just volunteered to buddy dive with me, if words were exchanged between the two of them in the parking lot.

“All the bodies we get out of water around here,” Marino continues. “Bays, lakes, rivers, the ocean. And the fire guys and the guardsmen and even rescue dive teams, they don’t want to deal with floaters.”

“That’s not what they’re in the business to deal with,” I remark, and whenever he is full of himself like this and talking nonstop I get ready to find out something I won’t be happy about.

“If we just had a boat. I got my captain’s license, and it would be nothing to be in business. A Zodiac Hurricane rigid-hull inflatable, a twenty-one-footer, two-forty-horsepower inboard jet would be plenty. Maybe we could try to get grant money for new drysuits and also a boat and keep it back here on a trailer and then we got our own way to handle things,” he says confidently. “I could be in charge of that easy. It’s what I know like the back of my hand.”

Traffic is heavy as we pull onto Memorial Drive, the gate frozen open behind us as other CFC employees turn into the lot.

“I’d make sure everything is stocked and stowed perfectly and deconned,” he says. “Would do everything by the book so no worries about some defense attorney saying evidence is contaminated. If you’re still going this afternoon, I should be with you. I don’t want you alone if it’s anywhere near Channing Lott.”

“I don’t think he’ll be in a position to do anything to me inside the federal courthouse, with marshals everywhere.”

“Problem is who a scumbag like that might have on the outside,” Marino says. “Someone with his money could pay anybody to do anything.”

“Apparently he didn’t bother paying anything when he decided to have his wife murdered.”

“No shit. Probably a good thing for him that he’s been locked up all this time. I wouldn’t want to promise some hit man a hundred g’s and then not ante up.”

“Do we have transport?”

“Yeah. Toby will be waiting at the Coast Guard base with one of the vans. I told him he doesn’t need to head out until at least an hour from now.”

On the other side of the busy street bending around our building, the river flows deep blue and sparkles in the sun, and leaves of hardwood trees along the embankment are beginning to turn yellow and red where the cold water chills the air. Fall is late this year, not a single frost yet, and most of the trees are green on the verge of brown. I fear we will transition straight to winter, which this far north can happen almost instantly.

“I know about the e-mail,” Marino finally says, and I figured he would get around to it eventually.

I can’t imagine Lucy didn’t tell him, and I say as much.

“How come you didn’t call me right away?” he asks.

Across the river are the high-rises of downtown Boston, and on the other side of them the inner and outer harbors and the Massachusetts Bay, where a fireboat waits for us. I hope the leatherback made it. I will feel sick to my soul if it drowned.

“I didn’t know if you were off the plane or why I should bother you with it,” I reply. “Some disturbed person who wanted to get a rise out of me and unfortunately succeeded. I hope it’s nothing more than an ugly prank.”

“You should have bothered me with it, because it could be interpreted as a threat. A threat to a government official. I’m surprised Benton wouldn’t see it that way.” Marino’s remark is more of a probe, as if he’s wondering as usual if Benton is vigilant about my safety or even a decent husband.

“Did Lucy also tell you where it was sent from? The IP?”

“Yeah, I’m aware. Maybe to make it look like it was one of us. Bryce, me, any of us who flew into Logan yesterday right about the time you got the e-mail. You need to ask who might want you to think that, who it might benefit if you don’t feel you can trust those you’re closest to.”

He switches into the right lane to turn onto the Longfellow Bridge, with its central towers that are shaped like salt and pepper shakers, and I think of Lucy searching my office a little while ago. We merge into a long line of cars crossing the river into Beacon Hill, rush hour barely moving, traffic stretching across the water and onto Cambridge Street for as far as I can see. I recall what she said about someone in our own backyard, someone we know, and I imagine Marino and her talking about it, speculating and accusing. It doesn’t take much to get her worked up and on the warpath.

“Look, it’s no secret I don’t have a good opinion of him. I mean, what the hell do we really know about him except he’s Anna’s nephew?” Marino then says, and I’m really not surprised this is what he’s been waiting to confront me with. “Me and Lucy are worried about motives that might not occur to you. We were trying to figure out a connection, and there is one, with his father.”

“A connection to what?”

“Maybe a connection to a lot of things. Including that e-mail sent from Logan. Including maybe the two of you having more going on between you than . . . I mean, it’s pretty obvious you’re under his spell. . . .”

“I wish you wouldn’t plant ideas like this with Lucy or anyone else.” I won’t let him finish such an accusation about my relationship with Luke.

“His father’s a big financial tycoon in Austria, right?”

“You really should be careful what you suggest to people.”

“You just saw Guenter at Anna’s funeral, right?” He won’t stop pushing.

Guenter Zenner is Anna’s only living sibling. I saw him briefly at her graveside service in Zentralfriedhof, a gaunt old man draped in a long, dark duster, leaning on a cane and immeasurably sad.

“Just so happens one of the things he’s into is oil trading,” Marino continues, as we crawl across the bridge, the low sun directly in our faces and as bright as the light from a burning lens.

“Lucy found this out?”

“What matters is it’s true,” he says. “And that pipeline from Alberta to Texas is a huge deal to oil traders. They’re counting on it, have huge investments and stand to make millions, maybe billions.”

“Do you have any idea how many oil traders there are in the world?” I remind him.

This had to come from Lucy, and I imagine her finding out about Marino staying at the CFC last night because at some point she looked for him. Maybe she went there to talk to him and discovered him drinking and napping on the AeroBed, I don’t know, and I reconstruct what happened after I received the anonymous e-mail at 6:30 p.m.

Benton and I spent some time discussing it before I called the Grande Prairie police and next was directed to an Investigator Glenn with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who has been working the Emma Shubert case since she disappeared in August. What struck me most was the hesitation I sensed and what it implied, and I mentioned something about it to Lucy when we discussed the e-mail over the phone.

Dr. Shubert was skilled in reconstructing dino skeletons,
Investigator Glenn said to me, and he was intimating that anyone who knows how to make molds and anatomically exact casts of bones in a lab might be capable of other types of fabrications, including a severed ear.

“The pipeline’s really important to global oil prices,” Marino continues, spinning his web, a web he intends to ensnare Luke Zenner in.

“I’m sure it is,” I reply.

“A multitrillion-dollar business venture.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me.”

“So how do you know for a fact there’s no link?” He glances over at me as he drives.

“Please explain how Guenter Zenner’s trading in oil among many other commodities, I can only imagine, would have something to do with Emma Shubert disappearing and my getting the e-mail?” I put it bluntly.

“Maybe she disappeared because she wanted to. Maybe she’s in collusion with people who have big money. The picture of the ear, the video are sent to you so we assume she’s dead.”

“You’re basing this on nothing.”

“No matter what, you’ll stick up for him,” Marino says. “That’s what worries Lucy and me.”

“Did the two of you stay up all night trying to force these pieces to fit into some puzzle you’ve devised? You really do want me to get rid of him that badly?”

“All I’m asking is you try to be objective, Doc,” Marino says. “As hard as that is in this situation.”

“I always do my best to be objective,” I reply calmly. “I recommend the same to you, to everyone.”

“I know how close you were to Anna, and I really liked her, too. Back in our Richmond days she was one of the few people I was glad as hell you trusted and spent time with.”

As if Marino picks my friends for me.

“But her family’s got a shady past, and I hate to remind you of that fact,” he adds.

“The Zenner family home was occupied by Nazis during the war.” I know exactly what he’s getting at. “That doesn’t make Anna or her family, including Luke,
shady
.”

“Well, the blond hair, the blue eyes. He sure as hell fits the part.”

“Don’t say things like that, please.”

“When you look the other way you’re just as guilty as the sons of bitches that do it,” he says. “Nazis lived in the Zenners’ ritzy castle while thousands of people were being tortured and murdered right down the road, and Anna’s family didn’t do shit.”

“What should they have done?”

“I don’t know,” Marino says.

“A mother, a father, three young daughters, and a son?”

“I don’t know. But they should have done something.”

“Should have done what? It’s a miracle they weren’t murdered, too.”

“Maybe I’d rather be murdered than go along with it.”

“Being held hostage in your own home by soldiers who are raping your daughters, and God only knows what they did to the little boy, doesn’t exactly mean you’re going along with it.” I remember Anna telling me her terrible truths, the wind
gusting fiercely and flinging dead branches and brittle brown vines across her backyard as I sat in a carved rocker and felt fear pressing me from all sides.

I could barely breathe as she told me about the
schloss
that had been in the family for centuries, near Linz, on the Danube River. Day in and out, clouds of death from the crematorium stained the horizon above the town of Mauthausen, where there was a deep crater in the earth, a granite quarry worked by thousands of prisoners. Jews, Spanish Republicans, Russians, homosexuals.

“You don’t know where Guenter Zenner got all his money,” I hear Marino say, as I look out at a bright morning and am dark inside, reminded of nights in Richmond at Anna’s house during one of the most harrowing periods of my life. “Fact is, Guenter was already rich before he went into banking. Him and Anna inherited a shitload of money from their father, who had Nazis living in the family castle. The Zenners got rich off Jewish money and granite quarries, one of them a concentration camp so close they could see the smoke rising from the ovens.”