The Bone Bed ks-20

by Patricia Cornwell

Unzipping the body pouches, I leave them open just long enough for me to attach labeled tags to the severed end of each rope that binds her. I return to the cabin, grateful to be out of the wind and dropping temperature, and I don’t bother putting my wet clothes back on but stay in the liner. It fits me like an oversized gray union suit.

  I put on my jacket and buckle myself back into my seat, and I let Labella know I’m pinching their liner and promise to return it after I’ve cleaned it. Kletty pulls in the anchor, and Labella starts the engines, and Marino sits across the aisle from me, trying to figure out his five-point harness as I try to figure out the order of things.

  I envision someone on a boat tying a large fender around the dead woman’s neck, then tying a second line around her ankles and attaching the other end of it to a dog crate filled with bags of cat litter. I imagine all this being pushed overboard as a two-thousand-pound reptile appears, dragging fishing gear, bamboo, and monofilament lines that might have been little more than an irritant until he whacked into the crate, impaling it with the pole. Now he has hundreds of pounds dragging him down and tightening the fishing lines around his left flipper.

  “What a strange world,” I decide. “The one thing he for sure didn’t anticipate.”

  I’m talking about the killer. I believe whoever dumped this woman’s body is also responsible for her death. I will work this case as a homicide unless the facts prove me wrong.

  “In my opinion?” Marino raises his voice above the thundering engines. “I think she was dumped overboard pretty close to where she was found.”

  “You might be right,” I reply, as we speed back toward Boston’s inner harbor. “The way the body was tethered, she couldn’t have been dragged very far without being pulled apart.”

  “Five thirty-four-pound bags soaked with water, and when that shit gets wet it weighs even more and sticks together like concrete,” Marino says. “So it’s not like something that was going to dissolve and leach out of the bags anytime soon. Plus, the weight of the crate. We’re talking at least one-sixty, maybe two hundred pounds, pulling on the body. A hell of a lot of stress on her neck.”

  “Any idea how long she’s been in the water?” Labella turns around in his chair, the boat slapping up and down as we speed through the bay.

  “Probably not long.” I think about Channing Lott’s trial, about the timing. “The big question’s going to be where she died and where she’s been since.”

  “It doesn’t look like her,” Marino says to me, and there’s no need for him to elaborate.

  I know what he’s conveying, and the thought crossed my mind, too, at first, but only briefly, only long enough to be face-to-face with her. She isn’t remotely familiar. I’ve studied photographs of Mildred Lott, a very young fifty, shapely and fit, with long blond hair and all the perfections her financial status could afford. I know about her every surgery, liposuction, and injection, having familiarized myself with records the police provided for me after she disappeared from her Gloucester home last March.

  “I have no idea who she is, but it’s not her,” I inform Marino, the Boston skyline straight ahead. “I don’t need to wait for DNA to tell us that.”

  “Someone’s going to make a stink about it being her until we let everyone know otherwise,” he predicts.

  “We won’t be letting anyone know anything until she’s identified and it’s safe to release information that’s not going to help whoever did this.”

  “If she’d been torn into pieces and we couldn’t recover her? Everyone would believe it’s Mildred Lott.” Marino is thinking about my appearing in court today. “People would be sure of it.” He’s saying a jury would. “They’d believe she turned up after all these months, and maybe that’s the point of the way she was rigged. To also rig the trial, to booby-trap it so the case falls apart at the last minute.”

  He’s referring to the notorious antics of Jill Donoghue, and as I understand it, I’m the last witness the defense is calling before resting a case that’s been spectacularly highlighted in the news.

  “You got to admit the timing’s unusual. In fact, it’s damn scary,” he says. “I’m not sure it isn’t deliberate.”

  “Channing Lott is in jail,” I remind him. “He has been since April. And it’s not his missing wife.” I stress that. “It’s someone else.”

  twelve

  IT’S THREE MINUTES PAST ONE WHEN WE REACH THE Longfellow Bridge connecting Boston to Cambridge.

  On the other side, MIT’s playing fields and buildings have lost their charm, are squared shapes of dull grass, dark brick, and washed-out limestone beneath a thick tarp of gray clouds. Trees waiting for fall are suddenly skeletal, as if they’ve flung their parched leaves in despair, and the Charles River is roughly stirred by a blustery wind that matches my own agitation.

  I read the text message again, wondering why I think it might say something different this time:

  Just back in session after adjourning for lunch. Still on for 2. Sorry.—DS

  I refrain from answering Dan Steward, the assistant U.S. attorney whose fault it partly or maybe mostly is that I’m being dragged into court at what couldn’t be a worse time or for a more ridiculous reason.

  From now on I’ll communicate with him by phone or in person. Not in writing again ever, I promise myself, and I can’t get over it. How awful. I’m thinking in headlines, and most of all I’m worrying about the dead woman in the van behind us. She deserves my complete attention right now and won’t get it. This is wrong.

  “I’ve always lived over a microscope,” I comment to Marino. “Now I live under one, every bit of minutiae open for examination and opinion. I don’t know how we’re going to do this.” I tuck my phone back inside my jacket pocket.

  “You and me both. I got no idea who to call first, and I’m sure as hell not doing what the Coast Guard said and bringing in the FBI right off the bat, just hand it over to them on a silver platter because Homeland Security says so.” He is talking nonstop, and about something else. “A jurisdictional cluster fuck. Jesus Christ, could be half a dozen different departments claiming this one.”

  “Or not. That’s the more likely story.”

  “A cluster fuck if I ever saw one.”

  Cluster fuck seems to be his favorite new expression, and I suspect it came from Lucy. But who knows where he got it.

  “The FBI will want the case because it’s going to be big news. No way this won’t be high-profile, maybe a national headline. A rich old lady tied to a dog crate and dumped in the harbor. Assumed to be Mildred Lott. Then, when it turns out it’s not, it will be an even bigger story.”

  “‘A rich old lady’?”

  “You mind holding these?” He hands me his Ray-Bans. “Talk about the weather turning to crap. I got to go to the eye doctor, can’t see worth shit anymore. Need a perscription instead of just using over-the-counter.”

  I’ve given up telling him the word is prescription.

  “Now my distance vision sucks, too.” He squints as he drives. “Pisses the hell out of me, everything blurry, can’t remember what they call it. Presbyphobia.”

  “Presbyopia. Old eyes.”

  “Goddamn nothing focuses anymore, like Mister Magoo.”

  “You know she’s rich for a fact? What makes you think that?” I place his sunglasses in my lap and adjust my vent, turning up the fan as we creep across the bridge in thick traffic. “And how do you know she’s old?”

  “She’s got white hair.”

  “Or platinum blond. It could be dyed. I have to look at her.”

  “Nice clothes. And her jewelry. I didn’t see it up close, but it looks like gold and a fancy watch. She’s old,” he insists. “At least seventy. Like she was out having lunch or shopping or something when she was grabbed.”

  “What she looks is very dehydrated and very dead. I don’t know how old or how rich, but robbery doesn’t appear to be the motive.”

  “Didn’t say it was.”

  “I’m
saying it probably wasn’t. Assumptions are always dangerous,” I remind him. “Especially in a case like this, where all we may have to go on are physical descriptions we put out there in hopes she’s in a database. We say she’s elderly with long white hair, when in fact she’s in her forties with dyed blond hair, and we cause a big problem.”

  “Someone like that’s probably been reported missing,” Marino says.

  “You would think so, but we don’t know the circumstances.”

  “She would be reported for sure,” he asserts. “These days people notice when your newspapers pile up or your mailbox overflows. Bills don’t get paid and services get shut off. Appointments are missed, and finally someone calls the police to check on whoever it is.”

  “Often that’s true.”

  “Not to mention her family complaining that Mom or Grandmom hasn’t answered the phone in days or weeks.”

  “If there are family members who care,” I reply. “What I will tell you with a fair degree of certainty is she’s not an elderly shut-in with Alzheimer’s who wandered off and got lost and didn’t remember who she is or where she lives and somehow ended up in the bay tied to a boat fender and a dog crate.”

  “No kidding.”

  “She’s a homicide, and her body was concealed for a period of time, then transported and dropped overboard,” I add. “And obviously the way it was done is for some effect that isn’t clear.”

  “Some sick fuck.”

  “It certainly seems malevolent.”

  “How long do you think she was kept?”

  “It depends on the conditions. Weeks, at least. Possibly months,” I reply. “It appears she was fully dressed when she died, and yes, I worry she was abducted. But it surprises me, if that’s the case, that there’s been nothing in the news. At least nothing I’m aware of. The police usually give us a heads-up.”

  “My point exactly. Unless she’s not from Massachusetts.”

  “There is that possibility, of course.”

  “Kind of sounds like the dinosaur lady missing in Canada.” He merges left onto Memorial Drive.

  “There’s no similarity I can see at a glance,” I tell him. “But I don’t know enough about Emma Shubert’s physical description. Just that she had short graying brown hair and was forty-eight when she disappeared.”

  “Plus, this lady’s still got both her ears,” he considers.

  “Assuming the photo of the ear sent to me is real and is Emma Shubert’s. There are so many ifs.”

  Marino eyes the rearview mirror, making sure the van transporting the body is behind us. “Well, maybe this one’s been reported missing and we’ll get lucky.”

  I don’t think anything about this is going to be lucky for us. I can’t shake the feeling that nothing has been done since this woman vanished and died because no one close to her knows, not her neighbors, not her family or friends, and that’s odd. I also find it odd and contradictory that while it’s far from obvious who she is, the person responsible for disposing of her body didn’t bother removing her personal effects. A victim’s belongings can be quite useful to the police.

  Why not get rid of her clothing and jewelry?

  Why have her body found at all?

  Of course, we might not have recovered her remains, I remind myself. I think of my shock when I first saw the way she was rigged underwater, one nylon rope around her neck, the other around her ankles. Had her tethers pulled her body apart, and I can’t help but suspect that was the intention, we might not have found a trace of her.

  Right this minute we might be on our way back to the CFC with nothing to show for our efforts except a yellow boat fender, rope, rusty fishing gear, and a fragment of barnacle and broken bamboo with a trace of something greenish on them. Questions and possibilities race through my mind and offer nothing useful, only more confusion and a growing sense of dread.

  Some evil manipulation, I think. Someone toying with us. Some malignant game being played out with deliberateness, and I suspect there will be no DNA on file, no police report, nothing on record, because those who count don’t know this lady has vanished from wherever she’s supposed to be. Chilled to the marrow, I turn up the heat and aim vents at my face and neck.

  “Really weird the way she was tied up.” Marino hasn’t stopped talking. “Maybe a different type of hog-tying. Then dump her and she gets tangled up with a dinosaur turtle. Geez, you’re going to kill me from heat stroke.”

  He closes his vent and cracks open his window.

  “Let’s refrain from using the word dinosaur, please.” I repeat what I’ve said several times.

  “How come you’re in such a shitty mood?”

  “I’m sorry if I seem to be in a shitty mood.”

  “You seem it because you sure as hell are.”

  “I’m concerned and frustrated because I’m racing against the clock,” I reply. “I need to start on her right now. What I don’t need is to have this important window of time wasted by a court case where my appearance is simply frivolous. And good God, could the traffic be any slower?”

  “It’s always bad around here. Morning rush hour, lunchtime rush hour, late-afternoon rush hour. Between two and four a.m. is optimal,” he says. “And just remember, the more pissed you get, the more you give them what they want.”

  How ironic that he of all people would be coaching me about the futility of allowing detractors to get me out of sorts.

  “She’s never going to be in better condition than she is right now,” I remind him.

  “There’s some stuff we can do. Don’t worry, Doc,” he says.

  My office is just ahead, silo-shaped, with the glass dome on top, like a missile, a dumdum bullet, or, as some bloggers call it, a forensic erection. Seven stories of ultramodern construction sided in titanium and reinforced with steel. The descriptions and quips, most of them irreverent and vulgar, are endless, and tomorrow’s news likely will bristle with them.

  Dr. Scarpetta returned to her forensic erection in Cambridge after testifying that Lott’s wife turned into soap.

  I glance at my watch and feel another wave of anger. It’s exactly eight minutes past one, and I’m supposed to be in the witness stand in less than an hour. I can’t possibly begin the autopsy now, and I’m certainly not going to let anyone else do it. The entire situation is outrageous.

  “It’s a leatherback, and that’s what we need to call it.” I pick up on my earlier point and try to sound less aggravated. “It’s not helpful to the turtle or any of us if we continue referring to it as a dinosaur.”

  “Pam says leatherbacks are the last living dinosaur on earth.” Marino takes the left turn that leads to our back parking lot.

  “The problem is if you say things like that, some moron is going to set out in search of it as if it’s Nessie or Bigfoot.”

  “I’d rather work with Jefferson at Boston P.D.,” Marino then says, as if it’s up to him to pick a homicide detective and sidestep what I have a feeling will end up being the FBI. “Technically, the outer harbor is Boston.”

  “I’m not sure of that at all,” I reply. “It depends on the latitude and longitude, and I don’t know enough about navigation to tell from the coordinates we got whether the water she was recovered from might be within the seaward boundary of Hull, Cohasset, or even Quincy. Add to that the question of where she went in and also where she died, where she was abducted from, assuming she was abducted. It probably will end up being FBI, no invitation needed.”

  “They’ll sink their teeth into it like a damn pit bull and take over the investigation on prime time.” He reaches up to the visor and presses the remote control that opens our gate. “I’m sure Benton will love getting his hands on this one,” he adds, as if my FBI criminal intelligence analyst husband leads a sheltered life.

  “Nobody wants something like this,” I reply, as the gate slides open. “That’s my bigger worry. That everyone will treat it like a hot potato. But more important than any of this is what we can do to
establish her identity as quickly as possible. We need to enter a physical description of her and her personal effects into NamUs.”

  The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System is a relatively new central database for people who have vanished. It’s a chance at least to connect the missing with the unidentified or unclaimed dead, but again, I have a strong feeling this woman’s disappearance hasn’t been reported.

  “No matter what, we’ll do that before the day’s end. We’ll want to e-mail radiographs, her dental charts, any distinct body features,” I continue going down the list as we drive into the back lot. “Put in a call to Ned or whoever might be available later this afternoon.”

  Ned Adams is one of several area dentists also certified in odontology and on call for us.

  “We need to get some pictures before court.” Marino parks the Tahoe in front of the bay.

  “Absolutely.” I reach down to pick up the trash bag of my wet field clothes.

  “And her temp, since we didn’t do that on the boat,” he says. “Probably the same as the bay, fifty-one degrees. Maybe one or two degrees higher, because the Coast Guard boat and back of the van will be warmer than the water.”

  “Yes, we’ll get it now, and then I need a few minutes to change back into my suit. I sure can’t go like this.” I climb out clad in the gray fleece liner, my orange down coat, and wet boots with no socks.

  “Not unless you want everyone to think you’re a whack job,” Marino says, as the bay door begins to clatter up, the white windowless van stopping in front of it.

  “We need photos, and most of all, swabs, because the quicker we can get her DNA profile in NamUs and especially NDIS, the better.” I continue going through what needs to be done immediately.

  “PERK her, clean up really fast, and get to court.” I hold on to a thread of hope that law enforcement somewhere has entered this missing woman into the National DNA Index System.

  “Tell Bryce to contact Dan and let him know we just got back from a difficult scene and I’m hurrying as fast as I can. Damn waste,” I then mutter. “Ridiculous. Pure harassment. Unadulterated effort to interfere and create a spectacle.”