The Bone Bed ks-20

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Well, Ethan could have just stuck it in one of those damn pet carriers and handled it himself.” Marino sets the forensic light on the counter and plugs it in anyway. “Half the time he works out of the house. What’s the big deal?”

  “Am I to infer you mentioned your theory about the cat getting hold of onions?” I label a rack of blood tubes that I may not need.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, that certainly explains why they’re treating it like a big deal.” I lower a respirator particulate mask over my nose and mouth. “Eating onions or garlic can be toxic for dogs and cats, and most pet owners know that.”

  “Shit, it’s like talking to Darth Vader.” Marino stares at my mask. “Maybe you should wear that to court and see what happens.”

  “I’m sure if Bryce wasn’t overwhelmed and beside himself before you got involved, he is now.”

  “When’s he not overwhelmed and beside himself about something?” Marino continues in his same grumpy tone, but he doesn’t dislike Bryce nearly as much as he pretends.

  It seems to be one of the favorite sports at the CFC for the two of them to go at each other unmercifully, and five minutes later they’re drinking coffee together or eating lunch, and at least once a month Marino is over at Bryce and Ethan’s house for dinner or a cookout.

  “He probably hasn’t seen the news Ron just mentioned or is even aware of it.” I unzip the first pouch. “Which is why we didn’t know about it, either.” I unzip the second one.

  fourteen

  INSIDE BLACK PLASTIC SHE’S PITIFULLY WIZENED, HER long white wet hair plastered over her leathery face. Her frail body seems to disappear inside a long gray skirt, a dark blouse that’s either purple or burgundy, and a navy blue jacket with tarnished metal buttons. All of the clothing seems at least four sizes too big.

  “What news are you talking about?” Marino pulls down his surgical mask.

  “Apparently, video footage of my examining the leatherback and recovering the body is everywhere.” I spread open the pouches and smell moldy old flesh. “Let’s get photos in situ of the way she’s bound. I’m going to need to remove the ligature around her ankles if I’m going to PERK her.”

  “A double fisherman’s knot. And this is the backup knot. The knots on each rope are exactly the same,” Marino observes.

  He begins photographing the severed lengths of yellow nylon rope wrapped and knotted around the dead woman’s ankles and neck.

  “Which is exactly what it sounds like,” he says. “You tie your primary knot, this one here, basically a double overhand knot. Then, for good measure, one of these.”

  He points a blue-gloved finger to show me.

  “A backup, just to make sure everything’s secure,” he adds. “So what someone did was wrap two separate ropes around her ankles and neck, and tied two knots on each, leaving the longer ends to be tied to the dog crate and boat fender, and it will be interesting to see what those knots are. I’m betting they’re the same.”

  He looks up at the clock and shakes his head.

  “You’re asking for it, Doc.”

  “Is there any particular reason to choose these types of knot, in your opinion?” I lock a new blade in a scalpel handle.

  “No logical one. Usually a double overhand’s what you use to join two separate fishing lines or if you’re attaching two different ropes to each other, which isn’t the case here. So there’s no good reason, except it’s probably what someone’s used to. You’re going to be late as hell, and this ain’t a hair appointment.”

  “What someone’s used to could tell us what sort of person is responsible.”

  “I think we’ve already figured whoever dumped her did it from a boat,” he says. “I mean, she wasn’t pushed out of a plane or a chopper.”

  “I don’t know what she was pushed out of.”

  Moving clothing out of the way, I make a small incision in the upper-right abdomen.

  “A fisherman, someone into boating,” Marino says, as I insert a thermometer into the liver to get the core body temperature. “Someone who knows about ropes and knots. You don’t just tie knots like this by accident.”

  Picking up a surgical knife from a cart, I cut through the yellow rope tightly looped three times around her ankles, and I tape the ends, labeling them, so I know which segment was attached to what. I measure the length and width of the rope, careful not to disturb the knots.

  “Marks around her ankles are very superficial abrasions,” I note. “No furrows or contusions, barely anything at all made by the ligature. Her neck will probably be the same, but we’ll save that for later.”

  “She was tied up long after she was dead.” He takes close-ups of the faint lines around her ankles.

  “There’s no question about it,” I agree. “Toenails painted pale pink and chipped. And she’s got some sort of reddish staining on the bottom of her feet, which is strange.”

  “Like maybe she had on red socks or red shoes at some point, something that faded on her?” Marino bends down to photograph the bottoms of her feet, the camera’s shutter clicking repeatedly.

  “More likely she was barefoot and stepped in something.” I look with a light and a lens, the dark reddish staining on the shrunken bottoms of her toes, the balls of her feet, and her heels. “Something that obviously doesn’t wash off in water, something she might have stepped in. That’s what it looks like to me. Whatever it is, it dyed her skin or is embedded in it, or both.”

  Using the scalpel, I lightly scrape some of the staining off the bottom of her left foot, wiping reddish flecks of skin off the blade and into an envelope as I resume relaying to Marino what Ron told me.

  “It’s on local TV stations but is also national news, fairly close-up video footage, some of which was taken from the air, but he’s not sure all of it was,” I explain. “We know there was a news chopper when we were on the fireboat, but what about when it was just the two of us with the Coast Guard? How about covering a table with sheets.”

  I peel the back off the smart label and stick it on the yellow silicone bracelet, which I fasten around her right wrist, and her skin is shriveled and tough like leather that is wet. Her fingernails are painted the same color as her toenails, a subtle peachy-pink, and they’re broken, the polish peeling off, chipped and scratched, as if she were clawing at something or digging with her bare hands.

  “Obviously the other helicopter did the filming if it shows you in the water.” Marino shakes open a plasticized sheet.

  “Unless someone was filming from a boat.” On her right index finger is a ring, an 1862 three-cent silver coin set in a heavy yellow gold mounting. “There were a lot of boats around,” I remind him.

  “That big white chopper hovering over us the whole damn time you were getting her out of the water,” Marino decides. “I should have noticed the tail number, dammit.”

  I try to wiggle the ring from side to side, puzzling over its size and that it fits snugly on her index finger when it shouldn’t, and I wonder if she originally wore it on a smaller finger or if the ring is hers at all. If it fits her index finger now, it wouldn’t have at death, because when a body begins to mummify, it becomes extremely dried out and literally shrinks the same way fruits, vegetables, and meats do inside a dehydrator. Jewelry, shoes, and clothing won’t fit the way they did in life, and I imagine someone moving the body from wherever it was concealed and rearranging her jewelry or perhaps dressing her a certain way before she was tethered and dumped into the bay.

  Why?

  To make sure the ring was found? To make sure her personal effects were?

  “I made a note of the tail number, wrote it down,” I’m saying to Marino, as I’m pondering these other things. “We can have it checked out with the FAA database.”

  “It probably will come back to the bank financing it or some meaningless limited liability company; same thing Lucy does. So when the cops are behind one of her batmobiles or batcycles, they can’t run her plate and figure out who she
is, and air traffic controllers can’t connect that sweet radio voice of hers with a name.”

  His Tyvek-covered feet make a slippery sound as he moves around.

  “Almost none of these choppers, even news ones, come back to anything that’s helpful,” he says. “Especially if they’re privately owned. When I started out as a cop, the world wasn’t so friggin’ anonymous. And you’re going to be late as hell. No way you can make it by two unless you’ve got a jetpack.”

  “The white helicopter with red and blue stripes on the tailboom struck me as private or corporate.” I pick up her left hand, holding it in my two gloved ones, and I look at the watch fastened snugly around her wrist with a black silk strap. “Except for the camera mounted on it. Assuming it was a video camera and not a FLIR. But either is unusual for private or corporate aircraft.”

  “Pretty sure I’ve never seen that bird around here.” Marino shakes open a second sheet. “Which is a little weird, because most of them end up flying right past us over the river on what’s called the Fenway Route, in and out of Logan. Sure as hell got no idea what TV station it might be, if any, or how the hell they’d know we were out there and what we were doing. I know Judge Conry likes you, but you’re pushing your luck.”

  “I am because I have to,” I reply. “This lady can’t wait.”

  “You’d better hope the judge sees it that way.”

  The watch appears to be Art Deco, in white gold or platinum, the bezel set with diamonds or some other clear gemstones, the movement mechanical. The time on the white oblong face is frozen at four minutes past six o’clock, and I can’t know if that is a.m. or p.m. I can’t know the date the watch stopped.

  “Maybe some other type of filming,” Marino then considers. “If they’re filming a movie or commercial around here and whoever was flying just happened to see what we were doing and grabbed footage.”

  “It’s obviously not Lucy’s new bird.”

  “Haven’t seen it yet,” he says. “She’s too busy going after pig farmers to give me a ride.”

  “We won’t remove her jewelry now, but let’s get photos, lots of photos. She’s not going to look like this when we get back.”

  “Have got a shitload already, but I’ll get more.”

  “More is better.”

  “Why would it be Lucy’s?” Using the ruler as a scale, he places it next to the wrist wearing the watch. “She sure as hell wouldn’t be moonlighting for some TV station or film crew, or posting videos of you all over the Internet.”

  “Of course not.”

  “You should give her the tail number and ask her to run it,” he says. “I guarantee she’ll figure out who it is and why they were spying on us.”

  “We don’t know that whoever was in that white helicopter was spying. Maybe they were just curious. There also was a sailboat nearby,” I recall. “A tall ship with red sails that were furled. It was sitting out there maybe a hundred yards from us when we were getting her and the gear out of the water, and it never moved. I’ll e-mail the tail number to Lucy.”

  I dip swabs into distilled water.

  “If we can find out where this lady died, we might find pieces of her fingernails,” I decide. “No defensive injuries I can see so far, but she was doing something that broke all of her nails. Toenails, fingernails, every one of them.”

  I rub the cotton tips under each fingernail, and the swabs turn a reddish tint.

  “The same reddish staining that’s on her feet?” I wonder. “Whatever it is, I can’t get all of it. It’s way up in the quick.”

  I hold the red-tinted swabs under the surgical lamp and examine them with the magnifying lens.

  “Something fibrous, maybe,” I observe. “It reminds me of fiberglass insulation but more granular, like dust or dirt, and a darker color.”

  I cut her nails with a pair of small scissors, and pink-painted slivers make quiet clicking sounds as they drop into the bottom of a paper envelope I hold open.

  “I’ll take a look under the scope, then see what Ernie has to say,” I add, and I’m mindful of seconds slipping away, of time running out for the dead woman and me.

  I might get in trouble, it could happen, and I label nail clippings and swabs for trace and DNA, and arrange syringes with different-gauge needles on a surgical cart as the minute hand on the wall clock ticks closer to two p.m. My pulse picks up, but I can’t stop, and inside a glass cabinet I collect ETDA blood tubes and FTA cards, although I know without a doubt that getting blood from her is going to be a challenge. It will have seeped out of vessel walls long ago, and I’ll be lucky if I get enough to blot a card.

  “You scribe and keep taking pictures, and we’ll go at this really fast.” I check the flexibility of the neck, the arms, and try to separate the legs, but they’re stubborn. “Rigor’s indeterminate,” I dictate to Marino, and he writes it down as I remove the thermometer from the incision in her abdomen. “Temperature of her liver is forty-two degrees, and that’s interesting. Are we sure about the water temperature of the bay? Pamela Quick said it was fifty-one degrees.”

  “The temp on the Coast Guard boat’s GPS was fifty-one degrees,” Marino confirms. “Of course, it would have been a little colder as the water got deeper.”

  “Nine degrees colder at the depth where she was held in place by the ropes?” I doubt it. “And she didn’t get colder in water that is warmer than she was. What that means is she was colder than forty-two degrees when she first went in.”

  “Maybe she was kept in a freezer somewhere.”

  “There’s no damage to her from fish and other sea creatures, which she likely was going to get if she was submerged for even a day or two. I seriously doubt she was in the water long enough to thaw,” I decide. “Either she’d already begun to thaw when she went in or she was kept really, really cold somewhere but not frozen solid.”

  I begin to undress her, the clothing soaking wet, soiled, and gritty, and she smells more strongly of decomposition. The foul acrid stench crawls up my sinuses and coats my teeth, and soon it will be bad enough to make my eyes sting.

  “Shit,” Marino complains, and he swaps out his surgical mask for one with a filter.

  I work silk-lined dark blue cashmere over her shoulders, pulling stubborn arms out of long, clingy sleeves, holding up her jacket to look at it front and back. I see no holes, no tears, no damage. But the three brownish metal buttons in front don’t match and look very old.

  “Possibly antique. Possibly military,” I say to Marino. “Let’s get close-ups. Like the ring with the old coin, these could be important because they’re unusual.”

  I spread out the soaking-wet jacket on the sheet-covered table, noting the long curved back, the tapered waist, the tonal embroidery on the sides and sleeves.

  “The label is Tulle Clothing, size six. Well, she’s not a six now. More like a zero,” I comment.

  “How do you spell Tulle?”

  I tell him, and he jots it down on a clothing diagram. “It’s quite distinctive,” I add. “Sort of a Tallulah style.”

  “Got no idea what that is.” He begins taking photographs of the buttons.

  “Retro-cut, with structured shoulders and wide lapels, and ornate embroidery stitched in thread the same color as the fabric,” I explain. “Imagine Tallulah Bankhead.”

  “Someone with money trying to be glamorous,” he says. “It doesn’t make sense if no one knows she’s missing.”

  “Someone knows. The person who dumped her in the bay does.” I begin going over the buttons with a hand lens.

  fifteen

  TARNISHED BRASS WITH A HINT OF GILT, EACH BUTTON has some type of eagle design and an iron shank at the back that has been sewn onto the jacket’s front with heavy dark thread.

  “Civil War. The genuine article. Around the same date as the coin in her ring.” Marino leans close, peering through his reading glasses. “Holy shit, these are something.”

  I return to the stretcher, and the putrid smell gets stronger as
I begin unbuttoning the blouse. Decomposition is darkly swarming in like a plague of invisible insects as we work and time slips away, moving her closer to putrefaction as I move closer to being held in contempt of court.

  “Probably not from a regular foot soldier. Probably officers’ buttons.” Marino reaches for a hand lens, judgment creeping into his tone. “Most people who collect old buttons don’t sew them on clothes. No normal person would do that.”

  “It does seem a bit out of the ordinary,” I remark. “Wearing antique or estate jewelry and so on is one thing, but sewing it on clothing would be another, I suppose.”

  “You got that right, and button collectors don’t.”

  His voice is flinty with disapproval, as if he’s made a sudden decision about the dead woman’s character.

  “They display them, put them in picture frames, swap them, sell them, maybe donate them to museums, depending on what they are,” Marino says. “I’ve seen buttons like these go for hundreds, even thousands, of dollars.”

  He studies the three buttons closely with the lens, nudging each one with a gloved finger.

  “If you look at them from the side”—he shows me—“they’re not dented in at all, are in really great shape, which adds to the value. You’d never sew something like this on a jacket. Who the hell does that?”

  “Well, she did, or someone did,” I reply.

  Removing her wet blouse, I decide it’s purple, not burgundy. The tag at the back of the collar is Audrey Marybeth, size six.

  “Maybe she was involved in antiques,” I add. “Maybe she collected or was a dealer, or the buttons belonged to someone in her family.”

  The bra underneath is loose around her chest, the cups several sizes too big, and I estimate the body has lost at least twenty percent of its weight due to dehydration. She dried out while concealed someplace freezing or near-freezing, cold enough to prevent bacteria from colonizing and causing the decomposition that is beginning with a vengeance now. Minute by minute her odor is stronger, and I’m asking for trouble. I imagine Judge Conry calling lawyers to the bench, wanting to know where I am, discreet at first, and then demanding.