The Bone Bed

nineteen

IT’S CLOSE TO SIX P.M. WHEN WE REACH THE LONGFELLOW Bridge in pouring rain and solid traffic, returning to Cambridge after one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had in court.

I don’t care what anybody says, there’s something suspicious about why he let her get away with that,” Marino hammers the same point, making me crazy with his speculations and theories of plots and plans and possible conspiracies. “It’s one thing for the judge to be an ass because you pissed him off, and I warned you about being late.”

I don’t want to hear another word about it.

As you’ve pointed out more than once? Since that Supreme Court ruling we’re going to be jerked around more than ever, hauled into court all the time for nothing. But you can’t just show up when you decide.”

I’m in no mood to be lectured.

But irregardless”—he uses a non-word of his that drives me mad—“the assistant U.S. attorney’s supposed to be on your side.” He turns up the windshield wipers full tilt, his reading glasses on the tip of his nose, as if they somehow will help him see in a downpour.

I was a defense witness, not a prosecution witness,” I remind him.

And that’s suspicious, too. Why didn’t Steward subpoena you? He had to know you were a sitting duck because of that e-mail about Mildred Lott turning into soap, so he should have beaten Donoghue to the draw. Then you would have been his witness. He would have qualified you as an expert instead of her doing it, and you wouldn’t have been put through the mill with all these personal questions that sure as hell didn’t make you look good.”

No matter who ordered me to court, I was going to end up there, and Donoghue would have asked whatever she wanted.”

You’re her witness and on her side, and still she does that to you?” he persists, and I can’t stand it when he gets this way, defending me after it’s too late, when he couldn’t have changed anything to begin with.

It’s not about taking sides.” My patience is almost shot.

Oh, yeah, it is. Everything’s about taking sides.” Marino leans on the horn and yells, “Move, butt munch!” He honks again at the taxi in front of us, and the rude noise goes through my brain like a spike. “Like, whose side is Steward really on? You were the last defense witness, and he didn’t bother to cross-examine you, just let that damn news clip hang in the air?”

There really wasn’t anything to ask me. I don’t know the identity of the body we recovered from the bay, and that was made clear.”

Huh. Well, the way he handled you makes me wonder if maybe he’s secretly in league with Donoghue, maybe getting paid under the table or has a promise of it if Channing Lott gets off. How do you know his billions of dollars aren’t what’s tipping the scales of justice in this case? Jesus! The a*shole’s tapping his brakes on purpose, wanting me to rear-end him! Move it, f*ckwad!” Marino opens his window and gives the taxi driver the finger. “Yeah, go ahead and stop and come over here, see what I do to you, piece of dog shit!”

For God’s sake, can we do without the road rage?” I ask. “Let’s just get there in one piece, please.”

We’re only halfway across the bridge, going ten miles an hour, the Boston skyline smudges of blurry light. Beacons on top of the Prudential Building are completely blotted out by heavy rain and dense low clouds that moil and churn.

Why the hell didn’t he object more?” Marino rolls up his window and wipes his rain-spattered hand on his pants. “The one who got away with murder is Jill Donoghue.”

Maybe he’s just a lousy lawyer.” The high-speed dull thudding of the wipers is almost unbearable. “I don’t guess you could turn those down?”

As long as you don’t care if I can’t see.”

Never mind.” I can’t remember what I ate today, and then I realize the answer is nothing.

Cuban coffee and an empty stomach. No wonder my head hurts and I can barely think.

Steward didn’t try hard enough to get that Fox segment excluded, hardly tried at all.”

I never got around to the granola and Greek yogurt that are still in my refrigerator.

You ask me, he threw you and the case under the bus, and did it on purpose.”

Let’s hope that wasn’t his intention,” I say, and what bothers me most isn’t that a television news segment was ruled admissible and shown to the jury but that the video was filmed at all.

For several seconds the dead woman’s gaunt leathery face was clearly visible as I was pulling her into the pouch-lined Stokes basket, and while it’s possible she’s no longer visually identifiable because of her severely dehydrated condition, I can’t be sure of that. Someone who knew her well, perhaps family or close friends, might have realized who she is, and that’s a terrible way to find out about a death. It should never happen.

He’ll get acquitted,” Marino decides.

The wipers swipe and beat the glass, the hard, chilly rain drumming the roof and flooding the windshield as if we’re inside a car wash, and Channing Lott might be acquitted, and maybe he should be. I have no idea. But if jurors witnessed what I did barely an hour ago, they must have been given a different picture of the formidable industrialist who seemed genuinely caught off guard by the video he watched in open court. He struck me as tragic and terrified, sincerely grief-stricken, as he seemed to anticipate what he was about to see. Afterward he shut his eyes, almost collapsing in his chair with what appeared to be immense relief.

If he realized the dead woman isn’t his missing wife, then he shouldn’t have felt he was just granted a reprieve, not if he’s to blame for whatever’s happened to her. Finding his wife’s body right now would be the best thing for his case. It doesn’t matter what I might testify as to how long she’s been dead.

A jury would find such postmortem artifacts confusing, would be baffled by the idea of an intact body showing up in the Massachusetts Bay some six months after the person allegedly was a murder for hire. I also accept the distinct possibility that Channing Lott is a consummate sociopath, a poseur and manipulator who knew all eyes were on him during that pivotal moment when the news footage began to play. Maybe he intended to look sympathetic to whoever was watching, and he did.

He may very well be acquitted, and if the jury has reasonable doubt, then that’s the right verdict,” I reply, and what I’d like to do this very minute is go home.

I want Advil, a long hot bath, and Scotch on the rocks, and I want to talk to Benton. I want to hear what he has to say about what just transpired in federal court. What are the rumors about Judge Joseph Conry that might help explain his anger toward me and unwillingness to sustain a single objection Dan Steward raised, few that there were? Then again, maybe I don’t want to know. It won’t change anything that’s happened.

Well, no way in hell the jury’s going to convict him.” Marino leans forward, squinting, trying to see through billowing sheets of water, the lights of oncoming traffic blinding. “All Donoghue had to do was introduce the suggestion that Mildred Lott’s body just turned up now or might turn up later or maybe she’s not even dead. Showing that news clip was something, a picture worth a thousand words, even though it’s probably not her.”

It’s not. Unless her medical records are fabricated and her height has shrunk.”

Well, it looks like everything else shrunk.”

Not her bones. Mildred Lott was supposed to be five-eleven, and this lady isn’t close to that.”

You got to give her credit, though.” Marino continues talking about Jill Donoghue, because he saw every second of what she did, having found a seat in the back of the courtroom without my being aware.

He was there for the entire ordeal, witnessing the judge’s tirade and my punishment of a fine some five times stiffer than what’s typical, not that I’ve ever been fined before. That judicial fireworks display was a perfect opening for what Donoghue did next, to build me up as a qualified expert before implying that I’m a feminist home wrecker, a medical experimenter guilty by association of snatching Japanese body parts and perhaps even indirectly to blame for atom bombs being dropped. Marino saw all of it and has chatted about nothing else as we’ve driven endlessly, slowly, miserably, through high winds and pounding rain that a few minutes ago was mixed with hail, the early evening unnaturally dark.

She saved you for last, and that’s what the jury goes away with—TV footage of a dead rich lady with long platinum-blond hair being pulled out of the water today.”

I don’t think her hair’s platinum blond. I’m pretty sure it’s white.” I can barely talk.

Reasonable doubt.” Marino wipes the inside of the glass with his jacket sleeve and turns up the defrost full blast. “If they didn’t have doubt before, they got it now.”

Whether he’s found guilty or not isn’t my concern,” I reply. “I have no opinion one way or the other about whether he had something to do with his wife’s disappearance, and frankly, you shouldn’t have an opinion, either.”

You know what they say. Everybody’s got one.”

At long last we are here, my metal-clad building an ominous tower in the storm, like the gray turret of a castle shrouded in fog, and I get an odd feeling that begins deep inside my gut, a chilly discomfort that moves up to my chest. The sensation reaches my brain as the black metal gate slides open along its tracks and Marino drives through, the Tahoe’s headlights slashed by rain and illuminating vehicles that shouldn’t be here. Benton’s black Porsche SUV is next to three unmarked sedans, as if he and his FBI colleagues have shown up to meet with me anyway when there just isn’t time, and it doesn’t make sense.

I sent Benton a text message the instant I was out of court and said tonight was impossible, as I still had the autopsy to do and it likely would be a complicated one. I might not be finished until nine or ten.

Who’s here and why?” I puzzle, as Marino points a remote at the back of the building.

That’s Machado’s Crown Vic. What the hell?”

The lights go on inside the bay, the heavy door cranking up, and in the widening space is the dark green low-slung hood of Lucy’s Aston Martin backed in next to my SUV.

Shit.” Marino drives inside. “You expecting her?”

I’m not expecting anyone.”

We get out, the shutting of the Tahoe’s doors echoing off concrete, and I scan my thumb in the biometric lock. Then we’re inside the receiving area of the autopsy floor with no sign of the nighttime security guard, but I detect voices along the corridor. People talking, several of them, and as Marino and I approach ID, we find the door open wide. The yellow boat fender, dog crate, and other evidence are plainly visible inside on tables, and as we get closer to the large-scale x-ray room I can hear my technologist Anne. I hear Luke Zenner, and the security guard appears around the bend.

Who unlocked ID?” I ask him. “Is everything all right, George?”

You got company.” He talks to me and won’t look at Marino.

So it seems.”

Mr. Wesley and some of his people are in there with Anne and Dr. Zenner. Don’t know what it’s about.”

I don’t believe he doesn’t know, and he stares straight ahead as he walks off, jaw muscles clenching. The red light is illuminated over the door of the x-ray room, indicating the scanner is in use, and I’m not expecting my husband to be dressed the way he is, in running clothes, his silver hair wetly combed back. He’s with Cambridge Police Detective Sil Machado and FBI Special Agent Douglas Burke and another woman I’ve never seen before, very short dark hair, maybe in her mid-thirties. I’m startled. I feel betrayed.

For the most part, it’s the opposite with CT,” Anne is saying from her work station, Luke sitting next to her in a chair he’s rolled up.

On the other side of the leaded glass, bare feet with shriveled toes and pink-painted clipped nails protrude from the bore of the eggshell-white Siemens SOMATOM Sensation scanner, and on video displays are images belonging to an Unidentified white female from MA Bay, I read. I can’t understand why Anne and Luke have started without me. I made it clear I didn’t want the body removed from the cooler. I gave a specific directive that the body wasn’t to be touched, that the doors to the ID and decomp rooms were to remain locked until I returned from court.

What’s going on?” I meet Benton’s eyes and see what’s in them. “What’s happened?”

He’s in a crimson Harvard Medical School sweat suit and running shoes, a rain jacket draped over an arm, and I suspect he was at the gym when someone interrupted him. Probably Douglas Burke, it enters my mind, the tall brunette far too feminine and pretty for the names she goes by, Doug or Dougie, and it’s not uncommon for her to vanish with Benton, to be unaccounted for. It could be any hour of the day or night or on a weekend or a holiday, and often I’m told nothing, and I know when not to ask, but now isn’t one of those times.

When we have a moment alone I will demand that Benton tell me exactly what is going on, because I can tell by the hard set of his jaw and tension in his sharp-featured face that something is, and it occurs to me that he hasn’t spoken to Marino or looked at him. Benton is completely avoiding Marino, as are Special Agent Burke and Machado and the woman I’ve never met. Only Anne and Luke are acting as if all is normal, oblivious to the real reason the FBI and police are here, which isn’t because they want to watch a CT scan or an autopsy.

How’s everybody doing?” Marino asks, and only Anne replies that she’s doing fine, and I can tell he senses something is off.

I was just explaining that CT is pretty much the opposite of MR in some regards, blood showing up bright on CT, while it’s dark on MR,” Anne explains to Marino and me.

No one responds, and the tension gets thicker.

But not so with other fluids—specifically, water—because water isn’t dense,” Anne explains to Machado and Burke, and to the woman I don’t know, whom I suspect is FBI.

I hold Benton’s gaze, waiting.

These areas here and here?” Anne indicates the sinuses, the lungs, the stomach displayed in 3-D on different computer screens. “If they were showing up really dark, pretty much black, it could indicate the presence of water, which would be typical in a drowning. CT is really great in drowning cases. Sometimes when you open up the body during autopsy, you lose the fluid before you can see it, especially if there’s water in the stomach. But we scan first and don’t miss anything.”

We wouldn’t expect her to have water in her lungs, her stomach, not anywhere,” I say to Anne, but my eyes are on Benton. “She’s moderately mummified. She hardly has a drop of fluid in her entire body, barely enough to blot a card for DNA, and if she’s a drowning, she didn’t drown recently.”

My mind keeps going back to the way Marino acted earlier today, as if the dead woman was personally offensive to him. His upset over the vintage buttons on her jacket was bizarre, and I have an incredible premonition, an awful one.

She’d been dead quite a while by the time she was weighted down and dropped into the bay,” I’m saying, “and I’m wondering who called this gathering?”

We think we got an ID,” Sil Machado says.