The Bone Bed

  “I absolutely know Indy wasn’t exposed to onions. Ethan was so happy I was finally back from being in Florida forever, and he made my favorite. His chili’s really amazing, and of course Marino and everyone’s blaming us as if we’re irresponsible and don’t care if we kill our cat.” He looks at me and looks exhausted, fear crouched at the back of his eyes. “She’s only ten weeks old, Dr. Scarpetta, and I’ve had cats before and know when something’s really wrong.”

  “I’m sorry, Bryce.” I set the file on the table and shut the door that leads into the corridor. “We’ll talk about it when I’m back.”

  “I know it happened at the groomer,” he continues from inside my closet, where he’s now looking for something on the floor. “Well, your shoes are here but still no pantyhose. Just a week ago Saturday, her very first visit to get her claws clipped, and there she was with about twenty other animals, including a parrot that was making these strangling, hacking sounds like it had kennel cough. I realize it might have been imitating it, but what if it wasn’t . . . ?”

  “Bryce, I don’t mean to sound insensitive, but I’ve got to get cleaned up.”

  He hands me my shoes.

  “Do you have any idea how careful we are?” He’s on the verge of tears.

  “I promise we’ll chat about this later. . . .”

  “We’re so paranoid about onions and poisonous things, like poinsettias, which we refuse to have in the house, and I don’t eat raw onions anyway. . . .”

  “I’ve got to get ready and can’t with you standing here. . . .”

  “So we always use onion powder, which is better all the way round, because there’s no chance of the ittiest, bittiest piece escaping the counter and ending up on the floor.” His eyes well up.

  “You put onion powder in your chili?” I carry my suit and blouse into the bathroom and hang them on the shower door.

  “Now’s not the time to criticize our cooking.” His voice shakes.

  “I had a cat when I was in law school, and sometimes he refused to eat. . . .”

  “They can be very sensitive. He was probably angry with you.”

  “A vet suggested I give him meat baby food, and apparently it had onion powder in it, which can cause toxicity, the same as raw onions, by oxidizing hemoglobin. . . .”

  “Oh my God! Did he die?”

  “No. It’s just something to think about and mention to the vet. And you need to leave so I can change. Please.”

  “It’s just terribly upsetting.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll just change in here.” I set my shoes on the toilet lid.

  “You need to be aware the media’s been ringing the phone off the hook.”

  His voice sounds loudly, tragically from the doorway that adjoins my office with his, and I unzip the gray liner and hurry out of it, leaving it in a pile on my bathroom floor.

  “Calling my cell phone, too, at least those reporters who have my number. There’s huge speculation that the old lady you just pulled out of the bay is Mildred Lott. . . .”

  “No evidence of it.” I run a washcloth under hot water and clean up as best I can, and of course a shower right now is impossible.

  “You know? That someone obviously was holding her hostage all this time, or maybe her disappearance was faked back in the spring or how she’s been hiding and finally drowned herself? You should hear the theories.”

  “There’s nothing to make me think it’s her.” I pull on a new pair of pantyhose I retrieve from a cabinet.

  “Meaning her husband, Channing Lott, couldn’t have had anything to do with her death, since he’s considered a flight risk and has been in jail without bond since April?” Bryce has the remarkable ability of talking nonstop without seeming to take a breath. “So how could he possibly have killed her or paid someone else to some six months after she supposedly vanished?”

  I step into my pin-striped skirt and yank up the zipper in back. “I don’t want you releasing any information at all, not one word about this case, please.” I hurry into my blouse, fumbling with the buttons and tucking it in, disgusted by how quickly rumors can start and how difficult it is to disarm them. “Not even a hint of an opinion about whether the dead lady might be Mildred Lott or Emma Shubert or anyone. Understood?”

  “Well, of course. I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. I know what the press does with the slightest nothing.”

  I turn on the vanity light, dismayed by my reflection in the mirror over the sink. Pale. Completely washed out. Hair flat from wearing a neoprene dive hood and submerging my head in cold salt water. I drip Visine into my eyes.

  “I’m just warning you I’ve got no idea what might come up when you get in the stand, because they can ask you anything they want.” Bryce is still talking.

  I rub a dab of gel in my hair and muss it up to give it a little lift, and it still looks awful.

  sixteen

  TRAFFIC IS BAD IN BOSTON, AND AVAILABLE PARKING IS nowhere to be seen at the John Joseph Moakley U.S. Courthouse, an architectural marvel of dark red brick and glass that embraces the harbor like graceful arms. I tell Marino to let me out.

  “Park where you can or drive around and wait for me. I’ll call you when I’m on my way down.” I have my hand on the door.

  “Hell, no.”

  “Right here is fine.”

  “No way. No telling what scumbag friends he’s got hanging around.” Marino means what scumbag friends Channing Lott might have.

  “I’m perfectly safe.”

  Marino scouts the parking lot, where there’s scarcely room for a bicycle, let alone a large SUV; then he stalks a Prius and curses when the driver gets out instead of pulling away.

  “Piece-of-shit green-machine crap,” he says, creeping off. “They should have reserved parking for expert witnesses.”

  “Please stop. Right here is perfect.”

  He targets the Barking Crab, with its yellow-and-red awning across the old iron swing bridge that spans Fort Point Channel.

  “I can probably find something over there, since it’s past lunchtime and too early for dinner.” He heads in that direction.

  “Stop.” I mean it. “I’m getting out.” I open my door. “Park anywhere you want. I’m so late I don’t care.”

  “How about staying put if I’m not there before you’re done? Don’t wander off, assuming it’s quick.”

  I hurry along the brick Harbor Walk, past The Daily Catch, to the waterfront, where there’s a park with wooden benches and thick hedges of flowering Justicia, an evergreen shrub that can’t have been selected by accident for a courthouse. Taking off my suit jacket, I push through a glass door that leads into a screening station where I’m greeted by court security officers, CSOs I know by name, retired cops now with the U.S. Marshals Service.

  “There she is.”

  “We’ve been wondering when you’re gonna turn up like a bad penny.”

  “On every TV channel. CNN, Fox, MSNBC, YouTube.”

  “I got a cousin in England who saw it on BBC, said the turtle you were working on was the size of a whale.”

  “Gentlemen? How are you?” I hand over my driver’s license even though they are used to me.

  “Couldn’t be better if we lied.”

  “Last time I was this good I forgot about it.”

  Typical men of the dark blue cloth, they fire off quips that make less sense the more one thinks about them, and I smile despite it all. I surrender my iPhone, because no electronic devices are allowed inside, doesn’t matter who you are, and my suit jacket is x-rayed as I walk through the scanner, everything by the book, doesn’t matter how many times I’ve been here.

  “I saw the fireboat go by earlier, Doc. Then the Coast Guard and choppers,” says the CSO named Nate, solid gristle, with the flattened nose of a prizefighter. “That lady you pulled out of the water this morning. Somebody’s mother.”

  “Or somebody’s wife. You think it’s her, Doc?”

  “It’s too early to say who it is
,” I reply.

  “A terrible thing.”

  “Yes, it is.” I put my jacket back on.

  “Promise your phone will be right here when you leave. They just went into a recess,” says the ruddy-faced CSO named Brian.

  He nods toward the glass, drawing my attention to a well-dressed man and woman drinking coffee on the brick walkway.

  “Those two out there?” he says. “Connected to him, to Mr. Lott. Maybe friends, relatives, bigwigs from his shipping company. Christ knows. He owns half the world. How come Marino’s not with you?”

  “He’s investigating the crime of no parking.”

  “Good luck solving that one. Well, don’t be wandering around here too much by your lonesome, you hear?”

  The man and woman on the other side of the glass are huddled close, looking out at the water. They turn their backs to us as if they know we’re interested, and I hurry up a stone stairway and take a marble-paneled elevator to the third floor. My heels click over polished granite as I rush past floor-to-ceiling windows that open onto the harbor and the outer reaches of the bay, the courtrooms on my right behind heavy double wooden doors numbered in brass. I weave through people waiting to testify and conferring and loitering, some of them attorneys I recognize, and Dan Steward walks out of courtroom 17 just as I reach it.

  “I’m really sorry,” I start to say, as he motions for me to follow him to an isolated area where the corridor ends beneath huge colorful panels of art.

  “I managed to drag and stretch it out.” He exaggerates a drawl, immensely proud of himself. “You’re the last witness, and I probably won’t need anything from you on cross, obviously.”

  “Both sides are resting their case for sure?” I can’t stop thinking about the timing.

  I really am the last witness the jury’s going to hear, he says, and the timing is remarkable. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence, no matter how much I reassure myself it must be one.

  “After we start closing arguments,” Steward says. “Hopefully we’ll wind it up today and the jury will begin deliberations before we break for the night. The good news is you haven’t delayed anything.” He stares at my breasts. “I told the judge what’s up, and I’m sure he’ll give you a chance to explain. That doesn’t mean he won’t chew you out. But if it wasn’t for me? Well, don’t think Jill bothered to stick up for you, even though you’re her witness.”

  He takes off his wire-rimmed glasses, wipes them with a handkerchief, his eyes riveted to my chest, where he has a habit of looking rather constantly. I’ve never thought he means anything by it. Dan Steward isn’t the least bit lewd or crass, is a proper but awkward man of small stature in his thirties with a big head of dirty-blond hair and big teeth. He has terrible taste in suits, this one an ill-fitting tan corduroy with a cheap green paisley tie that’s too long and unfashionably wide. He always seems frazzled and nervous, his demeanor grating to juries, I’ve been told, and I believe it.

  “But she knows,” I reply. “She understands why I’m late.”

  “Hell, yes. Your office was courteous enough to call her. . . .”

  “My office?” I can’t think whom he might mean.

  “When we recessed a few minutes ago, she indicated she knew you were on your way.”

  Bryce let Dan Steward know I was running late, but I can’t imagine which member of my staff might have left a message with Jill Donoghue, whose subpoena is the reason I’m here. I haven’t spoken to her directly. I wouldn’t in a situation like this, where there is nothing substantive I can offer to the case, only my physical presence so she can harass, manipulate, create high drama.

  “And I told her not to make a big thing of it,” Steward says, and Donoghue probably has earned the distinction of being the most hated human being on his planet.

  “What is there to make of anything if I haven’t caused a delay?”

  “I’m sure you’re aware of what’s all over the news, Kay.”

  “The body I just recovered has nothing to do with this, and I certainly can’t get into it, and I won’t.” I don’t mean to sound impatient or entitled, but I’m weary of courtroom antics and what I’ve come to call magic tricks.

  Maybe total disillusionment better describes what I feel, because it’s simply stunning what defense attorneys manage to pull out of their hats these days. The more unbelievable and illogical the tactic, the more they seem to get away with it, and I’m not far from being entirely cynical about a process I used to believe in, at times unsure the jury system works anymore.

  “Well, she just blasted a hole the size of the Grand Canyon in the Gloucester investigator, not Kefe, thank God, because he’s dumb as dirt, but Lorey, who went away very unhappy. I feel kind of bad leaving him up there as long as I did during cross, but as a result technically nothing has been delayed,” Steward says to my chest. “But what happens next isn’t my call. And the judge happens to have a bit of a hard-on for her.”

  “I’m really sorry, Dan. But not even two hours ago I had on a drysuit and dive mask and was recovering a dead body that I’m in a very big hurry to get back to.” I look out at the harbor, at a plane taking off from Logan and a red oil tanker gliding out to sea, and I can barely make out the Boston lighthouse jutting up in a volatile dark sky that threatens rain. “It was either be late for what truly is frivolous testimony or possibly lose evidence in what I’m fairly certain is a homicide.”

  “That’s what I suspect Jill the cobra fully intends to spit into your eyes.” Steward shuffles through a folder filled with notes he’s made on sheets of yellow legal paper, and he seems rankled by my reference to frivolous testimony. “She hammered Lorey to a damn pulp about the obvious problem of there being no body in this case and the lack of scientific evidence, planting the usual doubts in the minds of the jurors, because no one seems to believe in circumstantial evidence anymore.”

  “As we’ve discussed, these types of cases are extremely difficult. . . .”

  “I mean, come on. His wife is recorded on the security camera going out of the house at night because she hears something, is obviously talking to someone she knows outside in the pitch dark, and vanishes. Never to be seen again.” He talks over me in his irritating reedy voice. “Evidence on her husband’s laptop shows he’d been shopping around for someone to murder her for a hundred grand, and that’s not enough to send him away for the rest of his life?”

  “It’s not my case, for the very reasons you’re citing,” I remind him. “Her body hasn’t been found, and I’ve had nothing to do with the investigation beyond looking over medical records and your asking my opinion.” I refrain from adding that I’m here right now against my will because of him, and he of all people should have known that if he asked me anything in writing and I replied in writing, it would be discoverable.

  Especially if the opposing counsel is Jill Donoghue, who at this moment is heading in our direction, carrying a to-go cup of coffee, stunning in a fitted olive-green suit with wide lapels and a slim skirt, her long, dark hair softly curled with bangs. One of the most feared defense attorneys in Massachusetts, it doesn’t help that she’s quite beautiful, a graduate of Harvard Law School who last year was the president of the American College of Trial Lawyers.

  She participates in workshops and seminars at the Federal Judicial Center, where I’ve run into her on a number of occasions, her expertise electronic discovery, which of course includes e-mails. I can’t help but suspect that Steward deliberately set me up for exactly what I’m getting because he wants to sic me on his nemesis, as if I’m his pet pit bull when in fact what he’s manipulated more likely has given Donoghue an advantage.

  “Come on and tell me. No bullshit. Any chance that’s Mildred Lott you just pulled out of the bay?” he says somberly, quietly, his narrow face tense, his gray eyes flat behind his glasses.

  “I can’t know anything with certainty at this time.” I watch Donoghue head into the courtroom, and maybe it’s my imagination, but she seems to be smiling.
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  “You can’t say it’s not her?” Steward asks. “It sure would be good if you could.”

  “I’ve barely looked at the body. I haven’t autopsied it. At this time I have no idea who she is, but preliminarily and at a glance I didn’t see scars from cosmetic procedures such as breast implants, liposuction, a face-lift, that we know she’d undergone. No physical similarities I saw so far under the circumstances.” I stop short of saying what condition the body is in.

  “What circumstances, exactly?” he asks.

  “The circumstances of my having time only for a cursory exam before I rushed here.”

  “What about age, hair color?”

  “Her hair isn’t dyed platinum blond. It’s naturally white,” I answer.

  “Are we sure Mildred Lott’s hair was dyed?”

  “I’m not sure of anything.”

  “The way she’s dressed, any personal effects, such as wedding and engagement rings, an antique locket necklace Mildred Lott was known to wear and was believed to have on when she disappeared, that sort of thing?”

  “I found nothing consistent with any of that.”

  “Any idea when this newest case, this lady, may have died and how?”

  “I’m certainly not going to be compelled to testify about a dead body I’ve not even autopsied yet, Dan,” I reply, with a trace of resistance that I can’t seem to keep out of my voice.

  “Hey. It’s all about what Jill’s buddy Judge Conry permits.”

  “Her buddy?”

  “You know. Rumors. Not me who’s going to repeat them.” Steward glances at his watch. “I’d best get back in there.”

  I wait until everyone has gone inside, and I stand alone between inner and outer wooden doors, listening to the strong timbered voice of the clerk as he instructs everyone to rise for the judge. The sounds of people standing and resettling, and the gavel cracks, and court is back in session. Then a commanding woman’s voice, what I call a radio voice, Jill Donoghue’s voice, announces into a microphone that she’s calling me as her next witness.

  The door I face opens onto a vaulted arched ceiling hung with alabaster chandeliers, and tables occupied by attorneys and rows of crowded public seating leading to Judge Joseph Conry, robed in black and perched up high on a bench that’s elevated like a throne before a backdrop of leather-bound law reviews. I feel his gravity from the far end of his courtroom as I follow gray carpet toward the witness stand, directly across from the jury box.