The Bone Bed ks-20

by Patricia Cornwell

  “I really am taking this thing off.” Marino continues staring down at the heavy hunk of plastic as if it is a bomb or a giant leech.

  “The pelvic bone, the clavicles, the sternum. Hard points of the body that can sustain several thousand pounds of force.” I sound as if I’m delivering an anatomy lecture, and I sense the crewmen listening. “How many seat belt injuries have you seen? Thousands,” I reply above thundering outboard engines as I check my e-mail again. “Especially when the lap belt ends up around the abdomen instead of low around the hips, and in a collision what happens? All that force is directed at soft tissue and internal organs. That’s why we wear harnesses like this.”

  “What are we going to run into out here? A fucking whale?” Marino exclaims.

  “I certainly hope not.”

  We speed through a light chop, past long fingers of wharfs and piers that date back to Paul Revere as a British Air 777 roars low overhead, inbound for Logan to the east, its runways surrounded by water and barely above sea level. Off our starboard side Boston’s financial district sparkles against the bright blue sky, and behind us, rising above the Navy Yard in Charlestown, the Bunker Hill memorial looks like a stony version of the Washington Monument.

  “Let’s just see,” I say to Marino. “We’re what? Maybe a quarter of a mile from the terminals?”

  “Not even.” He sits tightly strapped in his chair, staring through water-splashed Plexiglas.

  The airport is sprawled over thousands of acres that jut out into the water, the air traffic control tower’s windowed floors supported by two concrete columns that remind me of stilts. Two intersecting runways extend far out into the harbor, their stony embankments remarkably close, not even a hundred feet to our left, I estimate.

  “Depends on where the LAN is located, of course,” I add, as I go into settings on my iPhone and turn on Wi-Fi. “But I know for sure I’ve been stuck in planes on the runway before and accessed Logan’s wireless. Nothing out here, though,” I observe over the noise of engines and the boat bottom thudding the water. “Logan’s signal has dropped off. So if the person sent the e-mail from a boat, for example, I’m going to suspect it was practically right up on the rocks, right up next to the runway.”

  “Maybe someone sent it from a boat that has a router,” Marino suggests.

  “Lucy is absolutely sure it was sent from an iPhone. But I suppose it could have been synced with a router, making it easier to access an unsecured network,” I consider, as we pass the curved glass building of the federal courthouse and its public park at Fan Pier.

  I check my e-mail again. Nothing, and I write another note to Dan Steward, letting him know I’m en route to a death scene and will have to take care of what I suspect will be a complicated autopsy when I return to the office. Please confirm whether I need to show up at two p.m. as planned, and I continue to hope my presence won’t be required after all. I hope it rather desperately.

  It’s absolutely absurd, my being subpoenaed by Channing Lott’s attorney, nothing more than harassment and an attempt to intimidate and humiliate, and of course I don’t say that to Steward. I’ll never again say much at all in e-mails or any written communication, and I dread what I imagine will be tomorrow’s headline:

  MEDICAL EXAMINER SAYS LOTT’S WIFE TURNED INTO SOAP

  Last March on a late Sunday night, Mildred Lott vanished from their oceanfront mansion in Gloucester, some thirty miles north of here. Footage from infrared security cameras shows her opening a door and emerging from the house into the backyard at almost ten o’clock at night. It was very dark out, and she was in a bathrobe and slippers, walking toward the seawall while apparently talking to someone, I’ve been told. The security recording shows that she did not return to the house, and the next morning when her driver appeared to take her to an appointment, she did not answer the door or her phone. Walking around back, he discovered a door wide open and that the alarm system wasn’t set.

  Deleted e-mails recovered by the police revealed a cyber-train that led directly to Channing Lott, whose wife isn’t my case. Her body hasn’t been found, and the sole reason for my being summoned to court today is an electronic communication, one I didn’t think twice about last spring, when Dan Steward wanted to know if a body were dumped off the coast of Gloucester that time of year, how long would it take to completely decompose and what would happen to the bones.

  I replied that for a while the coldness of the water would actually preserve the body, although fish and other marine life would do some damage. I said it could take as long as a year for saponification, for the body to form adipocere, which is caused by the anaerobic bacterial hydrolysis of fat in tissue. In other words, I made the mistake of saying in my e-mail that a body underwater for a long period of time rather much turns into soap, and it is this comment that Channing Lott’s lawyer wants to confront me with in court today.

  “If I end up having to appear at two, it probably is a good idea if you’re with me. I agree,” I say to Marino, because I already know what’s going to happen—that I won’t get out of it. “Maybe Bryce should be with us. I worry there will be a lot of media.”

  “What an idiot,” Marino says. “With all his money and he stiffs the hit man?”

  “That’s not why I’ve been subpoenaed or my point,” I reply, somewhat impatiently.

  “Some dirtbag he hires off the Internet, Craigslist, whatever, and he wonders why he got caught,” Marino says.

  “The point I’m making is the abuse of the judicial system,” I reply. “A perverting of fairness.”

  We are past the seaport and the massive stone fortification Fort Independence, which protected Boston from the British in the War of 1812, swerving away from Deer Island, where waste-treatment plant sludge digesters look like eggs. The gray sandy shoreline of Hull curves around a harbor packed with small boats, and a graceful white windmill rises from the hills. I let Marino know he should be careful that the same fate doesn’t befall him that has befallen me.

  “It’s a sobering reminder of what can happen,” I say to him.

  The defense wants me in court because Channing Lott wants me there, for no reason other than to force me into something, which Lott legally has the right to do. Any report generated by any forensic expert no longer speaks for itself unless both sides agree that the forensic scientist, the medical examiner, the scene investigator doesn’t need to appear in person. While I understand the logic of the Supreme Court’s decision that a document can’t be cross-examined, only a human being can, what has occurred in the wake of the ruling is that overworked, underpaid experts are being abused and run ragged.

  Any time we generate a document that might end up in court, one side or the other can demand we take the witness stand, even if the written words are nothing more than a voice-recognition text message or a handwritten note on a Post-it. As a result, some key members of my staff have begun ducking cases. If they dodge a crime scene or an autopsy or don’t offer their expert opinion or even a glib remark, there’s no chance they’ll be subpoenaed, which is yet another reason why I don’t like the idea that Marino is allowing the death investigator on call to go home so he can sleep over at the CFC.

  “If one isn’t careful,” I’m saying to him, “one might find he never has time to do his work anymore. I’m being dragged to court today because of an e-mail I sent to Steward when he asked my opinion and nothing more. My opinion and an admittedly careless comment in an e-mail and it’s all discoverable, every keystroke. And you wonder why I don’t involve myself personally in Twitter and things like that. Anything can and will be used against you.”

  That’s all I intend to say to him while we’re on a Coast Guard boat with a crew who can hear every word. When the timing is right, Marino and I will have a conversation about ornamenting and whatever else is going on in his life that has resulted in his turning the CFC’s investigative division into a Motel 6 because he can’t or won’t go home.

  “Coming up!” our pilot, Labell
a, lets us know as he monitors the depth sounder, and other vessels hail over the radio.

  The water opens into a fan-shaped expanse that is bordered by the north and south channels and their many islands, and we pass green channel markers on our right, the boat rising and falling, its thrust pushing me back in my chair.

  “It’s going to be a cluster fuck,” Marino says, when the fireboat comes into view, its emergency lights flashing red, a news helicopter hovering overhead. “Who the hell alerted the media?”

  “Scanners,” says Labella, without turning around in his chair. “Reporters monitor our freqs out here on the water just like they do on land.”

  He announces he’s bringing back the speed as we approach the James S. Damrell, a seventy-foot FireStorm with a flat-planed red-and-white hull and raked forward windshields, and bow- and roof-mounted fire guns. Surrounding it are a shark-gray police Zodiac, fishing and pleasure boats, and a tall ship with red sails furled, the cops and the curious, or maybe it is both, and I don’t look forward to what I must do, especially when there is an audience. I think of the indignity of being dumped like garbage or lost at sea and being gawked at.

  A liquefied natural-gas tanker painted parakeet green moves at a glacier’s pace, giving the flashing fireboat a wide berth, and Labella steers us closer and cuts the engines to idle as I recognize the marine biologist from the photograph Marino showed me. Pamela Quick and half a dozen marine animal rescuers crowd the lower deck and the dive platform, attending to what looks like a primitive cross between a reptile and a bird, some evolutionary manifestation from the dinosaur age, when life as we know it began to exist on earth.

  The leatherback is at least nine, possibly ten, feet in length, his throat puffing out unhappily, his powerful front flippers pinned to his black leathery sides with a yellow harness that crisscrosses his carapace like a straitjacket. Lashed to the back of the platform and rocking on the water is an inflated float bag with a wooden ramp on top that I assume was used to pull the monstrous creature on board.

  “This is insane.” Marino stares in disbelief. “Holy fucking shit!” he exclaims, as I get out of my seat.

  eight

  ENGINES THROB IN IDLE AS WE EXIT THE CABIN TO THE deafening thud-thud of a helicopter so low overhead I can easily make out the TV station’s tail number and the pilot in the right seat. Sunlight is bright on the water, the sky perfectly clear, but off to the northeast cumulus clouds roll in like a vast herd of sheep and I feel the dropping barometric pressure and the wind blowing harder. Later today it will be much cooler and rain.

  “Fifteen feet! Ten feet!” Sullivan and Kletty tie off fenders to handrails, yelling distances to Labella as he uses the wind to ease in portside, and we tie off.

  “Let me get on first, and you guys hand stuff over,” Marino says, and he climbs aboard the fireboat, reaching back for the scene cases.

  Labella places the flat of his hand protectively against my back and tells me to watch my fingers so they don’t get crushed between fenders or rails and to be careful where I step. The space between the two boats yawns wider and narrows as he steadies me over one rail, then the next, and I walk across the fireboat’s swaying bow, where a heavy steel anchor chain feeds from a storage locker on the nonskid gray deck, running between two red fire guns in the front of the boat and dropping straight down into the ruffled blue water.

  Marino sets the cases near an aluminum ladder leading up to the wheelhouse, and from its deck Lieutenant Bud Klemens waves and seems happy to see me. He motions for me to climb up as spectators circle the fireboat like shorebirds, and Marino scowls at the helicopter hovering not even five hundred feet directly over us.

  “Asshole!” He rudely flaps his arms as if he has the power to direct air traffic. “Hey!” he yells to the Coast Guard boat, to Kletty, who is stacking drysuits and other equipment inside a Stokes basket. “Can’t you radio them or something? Make their asses get the hell out of here?”

  “What?” Kletty yells back.

  “They got to be scaring the shit out of the turtle, and they’re gonna blow the hell out of everything with their damn rotorwash!” Marino bellows. “They’re too fucking low!”

  He opens the scene cases, and I climb up to have a word with Klemens, the commander of the marine unit, which is stationed at Burroughs Wharf, not far from the Coast Guard base and the New England Aquarium. At the top of the ladder a second firefighter whose name I can’t recall offers me his hand and I steady myself on the upper deck as it dips and rises in the heaving bay.

  “It’s only going to get rougher, I’m afraid,” says the fireman, thickly built, with white hair clipped close to his scalp, a tattoo of a bear on his bulging left calf. “The sooner we get this done the better.”

  Both men wear summer uniforms of navy cargo shorts and T-shirts, their portable radios slung over their shoulders. On a strap around Klemens’s neck is a remote steering station, what looks like a high-tech PlayStation console, that he can use from any area of the boat to steer its four jet engines when they’re running.

  “I’m Jack.” The fireman with the bear tattoo reminds me we’ve met before. “The Sweet Marita, the trawler that burned up near Devils Back last year? A bad one.”

  “Yes, it was.” A liquefied petroleum gas leak caused an explosion, and three people died. “How’s it going?” I ask Klemens.

  “Too much of a carnival for my taste,” he says, and I do my best to ignore the uncanny sense of familiarity he always makes me feel.

  Tall and rawboned, with sharp features, vivid blue eyes, and a mop of sandy hair, he looks exactly the way I imagine my father would have, had he lived to see his forties. When Klemens and I work cases together, I have to resist openly staring at him as if the most dominant figure from my childhood has come back from the dead.

  “I’m afraid we’re attracting quite a crowd, Doc, and I know you don’t like that.” Klemens looks up, shielding his eyes with his hand. “Not a damn thing I can do about it, but at least this jerk’s backing off, so maybe we can hear again.”

  We watch the helicopter ascend vertically, leveling off at about a thousand feet, and I wonder if the Coast Guard radioed the television news pilot and told him to gain altitude immediately. Or do we have the fire department to thank for it?

  “Much better,” I agree. “But I wish it would buzz off.”

  “It won’t.” The fireman named Jack scans the water with field glasses. “One hell of a story. Like capturing Nessie, and the media doesn’t even know the half of it yet.”

  “What does the media know, exactly?” I ask him.

  “Well, they know we’re out here, obviously, and the sooner we get this big boy back in the water, the better.”

  “Should be releasing him in a few, which is damn good, for a lot of reasons,” Klemens says to me. “You can see how low we are.”

  The dive platform is level with the bay because of the weight of the turtle and the rescuers attending to it, water rolling around them as the boat lifts and settles on swells.

  “Rated for twenty-five hundred pounds and maxed out, never seen anything like the size of this one,” Klemens says. “We run into entanglements and strandings all the time, and it’s almost always too late, but this one’s got a real good chance. What a monster.”

  Klemens balances himself against the tender, a rigid-inflatable rescue RIB with a gray tube hull and a 60-horsepower engine. I note that on the other side and still under its red tarp is the A-frame and hydraulic winch that can be used to retrieve people or other deadweight from the water, including a monster turtle. Obviously the winch isn’t what got this creature on board, I remark to Klemens, and I’m not surprised. Whether it’s an eight-hundred-pound gray seal or a huge loggerhead or dolphin, marine rescuers won’t run the risk of causing further injury and typically refuse the help of a winch.

  “Anything that might cause the slightest transfer of trace evidence or artifacts.” I remind Klemens I need to know everything that’s been done.
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  “Well, I don’t think the turtle killed anyone,” he says, with mock seriousness.

  “Probably not, but all the same.”

  “No machinery was used,” he confirms. “Of course, my feeling about it is if we can sling human beings on board without hurting them, we sure as hell can do a turtle. But they did it their usual way, pulled him in close, harnessed him, got a ramp under him, and inflated the float bag. Then it took all of them and us to pull him on the platform. That was after they got his flippers restrained, obviously. He gets going with those things, he could tear the damn boat apart and knock a few of us into last year.”

  I direct his attention to a yellow boat fender. Not far from the boat, it’s attached to a buoy line, and I ask if that was what the turtle was entangled with. I notice that nothing has been cleated off.

  “Nope,” he says. “Some kind of fishing gear, possibly snoods from a longline or a trolling line that got wrapped around his left-front flipper.”

  “He wasn’t entangled with the same line the body is attached to?” I don’t understand.

  “Not directly. What he got wrapped up in was about fifty feet of monofilament lines, three of them, and wire leaders with rusty hooks. I’m guessing the rig got free of its fisherman float at some point, drifted on the current, and got snagged up with that buoy line.”

  He points to the one attached to the yellow boat fender.

  “And then the turtle got snagged in the fishing line. But like I said, that’s just a guess,” Klemens says. “We won’t know until everything’s recovered, and I’m assuming it will be you doing that?”

  “Yes. When we’re done here and he’s safely back in the water and out of range.”