The Bone Bed

  “I seriously doubt she was looking for a romantic relationship or was the sort to connect with a stranger on the Internet who called himself The Dude,” I remark. “There’s not the slightest suggestion she was an avid bowler, no bowling shoes or balls or trophies, I assume? And no clothing or jewelry I’ve seen in photographs is remotely similar to what the body had on. It doesn’t appear to be the right size. It would have been too small for her, at least when she was alive and not mummified.”

  “What I’m just wondering is if the conditions necessary for a body to mummify rapidly might be manufactured,” Burke says.

  “Whatever she had on when she was abducted or vanished,” I add, “isn’t what she was wearing in the bay. She was dressed. She was staged. Someone did it for a reason.”

  For his pleasure. I think of what Benton said. The killer choreographs what makes him feel important and powerful. Whatever it is, he plays it out with victims who have nothing to do with him. They aren’t who he’s kidnapping and killing.

  “Might mummification be induced artificially?” Burke says, and I know what she wants.

  “You mean if the body were placed inside a very hot, dry space, for example”—I give her the pitch she’s waiting for—“and left to dehydrate?”

  I walk into the bathroom, black and white subway tile and a claw-foot tub with brass cross-handled faucets.

  “Which would require having access to such a place and feeling confident what you’re doing wouldn’t be discovered.” I lead her down the path she’s already on.

  “Isn’t it true that mummification in a closed structure that’s hot and dry could occur in as few as eleven days?” She lets me know what I’ve by now deduced is her theory. “What if the person installed a sauna in his basement? Couldn’t that work?”

  “You mean the way Marino did?”

  “Yes,” she says. “The way he did when he bought his house this past summer.”

  “You mean the sauna he built from a kit that can fit one person sitting up on a bench not much wider than a toilet seat?”

  The shower stall is the same tile, and bars of soap are dried out, and nothing looks recently used. I open the mirrored medicine cabinet door over the marble shell pedestal sink, the handles and fittings malachite and bronze.

  “That rather horrible little sweatbox that looks like a Porta-John?” I ask.

  She has more night guards, each from the same West Palm Beach dentist.

  “A sauna that’s on a sixty-minute timer so one is constantly having to reset it?” I continue, and Burke is silent in the doorway.

  I pick up prescription bottles, more muscle relaxers, Flexeril, Norflex, and the anti-inflammatory drugs Vioxx and Celebrex. She was taking the antidepressant nortriptyline, all of the medications prescribed by this dentist, Dr. Pulling, and consistent with treatments for the temporomandibular joint and muscle disorder known as TMJ.

  She had a bad case of it. She would have suffered chronic pain. She was in a vortex of getting dental work done to relieve a wretched condition that can cause the jaw to lock or dislocate and the ears to ring and a constant ache that radiates down the neck and shoulders and debilitates.

  “So I guess he dehydrated her slowly, running downstairs on the hour to reset the infrared heater, including last week, when he was out of town, in Florida?” I’m careful not to sound sarcastic. “And by the way, that kit he bought because he thought it would help him lose weight would mean the body was propped up in a sitting position.”

  I walk out of the bedroom.

  “She would have desiccated, dried out in that position.” I keep talking as I go down the stairs and Burke is behind me. “And if the body was straightened, such as by weights or floats pulling on it when it was tethered in the water? Tension at the joints and the skin’s going to split. She has no skin splitting, and her core body temperature was colder than the bay, which isn’t possible unless the body was refrigerated, possibly frozen.”

  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 w
as 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?”