The Bone Bed

  “Yes, ma’am, Chief,” he says.

  “We’ll let you know when we get an idea of what might be headed this way,” I add.

  “Yes, ma’am, Chief. That would be good,” he replies, and I’m always ma’am and Chief to him, and I think he likes me well enough even if he doesn’t show it.

  I check the sign-in log, a big black ledger, and one of the few documents I won’t permit to be electronic. Looking over what I recognize as Marino’s small snarled handwritten entries for bodies that have arrived since I checked when I first got here around five, I’m reminded that what Lucy reported is only partially true. While there was no need for an investigator to respond to any scenes after hours, there are cases, four of them, that require autopsies. The person who would have decided to have the bodies sent in for postmortem examinations was the investigator on call, who I now know was Toby for the suspected blunt-force trauma from a fall and Marino for the rest of them.

  The ones he handled occurred in local hospitals or were DOAs, two motor-vehicle fatalities and a possible drug overdose suicide, and responding to the scenes of the fatal events or actual deaths wouldn’t have been necessary unless the police requested it. Marino must have got the information over the phone, and I turn around to ask him about the cases we have so far this day, but the person I sense nearby isn’t him after all. I’m startled to find Luke Zenner inches from me as if he traded places with Marino or materialized out of nowhere.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you.” He’s carrying his briefcase and wearing a white shirt with the sleeves folded up to his slender elbows and a narrow red-and-black striped tie, sneakers, and jeans.

  “I’m sorry. I thought you were Marino.”

  “I just saw him in the parking lot scouting out one SUV or van and then another, whatever looks the best and has the biggest engine. But thanks for thinking I was him.” He gives me an ironic smile, his eyes warm, his British accent belying his Austrian roots. “I’ll accept you meant it as a compliment,” he adds wryly, and I’m not sure if he dislikes Marino as much as Marino dislikes him, but I suspect their feelings are mutual.

  Dr. Luke Zenner is new in more ways than one, recently board-certified, not even three years ago, and I hired him this past June, much against Marino’s wishes, I should add. A talented forensic pathologist, Luke also is the nephew of a friend of mine whose funeral we just attended, Dr. Anna Zenner, a psychiatrist I became close to more than a decade ago, during my Richmond days. That connection is the source of Marino’s objection, or at least this is what he claims, although resentment likely is the more accurate reason for why he is blatantly unkind and unhelpful to a very nice-looking young blond-haired blue-eyed doctor who is a citizen of the world with a personal tie to me.

  “You heading off? A scene? A SWAT situation? The firing range? A reality show?” Luke notices the way I’m dressed, taking in every inch of me. “No court after all?”

  “We’ve got a case in Boston, a body in the harbor. It may be a difficult recovery because of fishing gear and whatever else it’s tethered to,” I reply. “I don’t know about court, but I’ll probably have to be there. There’s not much choice these days.”

  “Tell me about it.” He watches a group of forensic scientists heading to the elevator, young women who greet us shyly and can scarcely take their eyes off him. “You so much as initial something and get summoned to appear.” His attention lingers on the women, reminding me of what Marino accuses, that Luke takes what he wants, doesn’t matter who she is or her marital status. “Much of it is harassment.”

  “Some of it is,” I agree.

  “I can go with you if you need some help. What kind of case? A drowning?” His vivid blue eyes are fastened to me. “I remind you I’m a certified scuba diver, too. We can buddy dive. The visibility in the harbor is bound to be quite bad, the water cold as hell. You shouldn’t be alone. Marino doesn’t dive. I’m happy to go.”

  “I’m not sure at the moment what we’ve got, but I think we can handle it,” I reply. “I’ll trust you to manage morning rounds and oversee the assigning of cases to the other docs. That would be much appreciated.”

  “Of course. When you’ve got a moment, can we talk about the on-call schedule or lack of one?”

  He stares at me as I open the door that leads into the bay, his keen face so much like his aunt’s that I find it unsettling. Or maybe it’s the way he looks at me, the way he helps himself to me and how it makes me feel and the difficulties it has caused.

  “It’s a bit of a problem.” He’s saying Marino is, and maybe saying something else.

  It is the something else I fear, and I’m reminded of Vienna after the service, when Luke guided Benton and me along the graceful tree-lined paths of the Zentralfriedhof to show us the graves of Brahms and Beethoven and Strauss. Benton got palpably unhappy. I could feel his upset like sleet stinging my face.

  “I understand, and plan to take it up with him.” I promise Luke I will deal with the electronic calendar problem, that if need be I’ll have Bryce take it over, and while I’m saying all this I’m remembering what happened.

  It was awful. Benton’s visible displeasure was triggered by nothing more than Luke’s ability to speak perfect English and German and serve as a thoughtful, affectionate guide on a very sad occasion, the burial of his aunt, whom I dearly loved. But Luke, her only nephew, was gracious and brave and unflappably charming, and as we stopped to look at the monument to Mozart, where people had placed candles and flowers on its marble steps, Luke hooked his arm around me to thank me for coming to Vienna for the funeral of Anna, his only aunt and someone I could never forget.

  That was all, a hug that pulled me close for a tender moment. But it was enough. When Benton and I returned to our hotel near the Ringstrasse, we drank and didn’t eat, and we argued.

  “Where is your respect?” my FBI husband began to interrogate me, and I knew what he meant, but I wouldn’t own up to it. “You really don’t see it, do you, Kay?” He paced the room furiously as he opened another bottle of champagne. “Things start this way, you know.” He wouldn’t look at me. “The nephew of a friend, and you treat him like family and give him a job and next thing . . . ?” He drank half a glass of champagne in one swallow. “He’s not Lucy. You’re projecting as if you’re his only aunt the way Anna was his only aunt, and somehow that makes you his de facto mother the same way you’re Lucy’s de facto mother, and next thing . . . ?”

  “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 occur
s 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.”