The Bone Bed

twenty-two

HEAVY RAINS HAVE TURNED TORRENTIAL, THE VIOLENT storm unseasonable for fall, with high winds stripping trees of any leaves left and thunder cracking like a war going on. Water sprays the undercarriage of the SUV and splashes the glass, and Benton seems miles from me as I drive through the dark puddled streets of mid-Cambridge.

It’s common sense that he can’t be involved,” he says from the passenger’s seat, where he’s alert to his surroundings and not looking at me.

Whose common sense?” I try not to sound tense.

Do you want him leaving his DNA inside her house?”

Hopefully he wouldn’t, but of course not.” I try to sound reasonable.

Benton’s phone glows in the dark, and he types something on it.

After he’s possibly already transferred his DNA to her personal effects, to her clothing?” He returns the phone to his lap. “Because I’m betting he handled all sorts of things.”

Wipers thud and the defrost blasts.

I don’t care what protective shit he had on,” Benton then says. “These days you can get DNA from air.”

Not quite,” I reply. “But he shouldn’t search her house.” I agree with that. “Although there’s no proof he knew her, ever met her, or had a clue someone stole her identity on Twitter. There’s no shred of evidence he’s done anything wrong.”

It doesn’t look good.”

It looks like what it is.” My anger glints. “Someone intended to implicate him.”

We shouldn’t do anything to make it look worse.”

So I lose my chief investigator because he got set up and made a fool of by whoever’s involved?” I’m frustrated, on the verge of furious, that the FBI suddenly assumes it has a say in how I run my office.

I’m angered by the suggestion that investigators I train leave their DNA everywhere.

He was set up because he was an intended target,” I add.

He needs to stay out of this case. He needs to stay away from the CFC for a while.”

That’s what you think or what your colleagues think?” Lightning flashes and the sky looks bruised.

It’s not for me to decide how Marino should be handled. It’s not appropriate for me to decide, in light of personal connections. In light of our history.” Benton doesn’t look at me, and I know when he’s wounded.

It seems if anyone should decide, it’s the one who knows him best.”

Yes, I know him,” he says.

You certainly do. And your colleagues don’t.”

Not the way I know him. You’re right about that. And maybe you should think about what I know.”

I should think about what you know of Marino’s flaws.” It’s obvious what he’s alluding to, and I can’t stop this from where it’s going.

Flaws. Christ,” he says.

Don’t do this, Benton.”

Yes, flaws,” he says.

Goddammit, stop.”

What a way to put it,” he says, in the voice of anger, of hurt.

You’re finally paying him back?” I ask.

Nothing more than a flaw or two.”

You’re going to pay him back at last for a night when he was drunk and on medication?” I go ahead and say it. “When he was out of his mind?”

The oldest excuse in the history of the world. Blame it on pills. Blame it on booze.”

This isn’t helpful.”

Plead insanity when you sexually assault someone.”

Please don’t tell me what happened then has a bearing on decisions you’re making now,” I say to him. “I know you wouldn’t throw him to the wolves for a mistake he made years ago. One he couldn’t be sorrier for.”

Marino throws himself to the wolves. He’s his own wolf.”

I drive past a construction site where bulldozers parked in muddy rivers of rainwater remind me of prehistoric creatures stranded, of floods, of life swept away. My every thought is dark and morbid and honed by the fear that Benton stood silently inside the doorway of the decomp room to send me a message. I fear the flaws he’s really talking about aren’t Marino’s. They’re mine.

Please don’t punish him because of me,” I say quietly. “He’s not a predator. He’s not a rapist.”

Benton doesn’t respond.

He’s certainly not a murderer.”

Benton is silent.

Marino’s been framed; if nothing else he’s been discredited, been humiliated by Peggy Stanton’s killer.” I look at Benton as he stares straight ahead. “Please don’t use it as an opportunity to punish.” I mean as an opportunity to punish me.

The SUV splashes through water that has pooled in low-lying areas, broken branches littering the street, as neither of us speak, and the silence convinces me of what I suspect. The space between us is vast and empty, as rain billows in sheets and dead leaves dart and swarm in the dark like bats.

He was set up, yes. That much I believe,” Benton finally says, almost wearily. “God knows why anyone would bother. He’s perfectly capable of setting himself up. He doesn’t f*cking need help.”

Where is he? I hope he’s not alone right now.”

With Lucy. He’s managed to make his compromised position much worse because of his rude defensive behavior.”

I glance in the mirrors, my eyes watering in glaring headlights as cars go past.

Acting like a defiant, uncooperative total jerk,” Benton continues, and his tone has changed, as if he let me know what he wants me to know, and it’s enough.

I’m not surprised he’s beside himself,” I hear myself say, as I’m realizing something else entirely.

The observation windows that overlook the autopsy rooms didn’t enter my mind at the time.

I can only imagine his embarrassment and anger,” I add, but that’s not what’s got my attention.

I didn’t think of the teaching labs. It never occurred to me that anybody might be in them with the lights turned off.

He certainly can be his own worst enemy.” I keep talking while my thoughts course along a different track.

Benton was up there watching, and during certain moments it couldn’t have been more obvious. I didn’t move away. I didn’t try to stop it, because I couldn’t, because I wanted it. I desired him in the midst of what was dead and horrible, when the urgency to feel alive can override what is logical.

His rages, his insults; he was completely uncooperative,” Benton is saying, and I’m barely listening.

Luke asked me and I thought about it, wondered where and when as I entertained fleeting plans about how to get away with it. I said no and felt yes, what Benton accused me of in Vienna true.

I had to leave the room at one point so I didn’t lose it with him.” What I hear Benton saying is he left the conference room upstairs.

He’s making sure I know what he did, checking on us from behind the darkened glass of a teaching lab.

All because he had to start a relationship with a complete stranger in cyberspace, for Christ’s sake,” Benton says.

Welcome to modern life,” I reply bleakly. “People do it every day.”

No one I know.”

Marino’s been as voraciously lonely and as empty as a black hole ever since Doris left, and that was almost longer ago than they were married. He’s had nothing but meaningless encounters ever since, most of them with women who hurt him, take advantage, are a horror show.”

He’s certainly had his turn at being the horror show, the one doing the hurting,” Benton says, and I don’t argue with him.

I can’t possibly.

No one I work with meets people on the goddamn Internet.” He makes that point again.

That’s rather difficult for me to believe.”

No one I work with is that stupid,” he says. “The Internet’s the new mafia. It’s what the FBI infiltrates undercover and spies on. We don’t go there for our f*cking personal lives.”

Well, Marino can be that stupid,” I reply. “He’s that lonely and misses his wife and misses being a cop and fears getting old and has no insight about any of it.”

I drive slowly along 6th Street, the Cambridge Police Department’s headquarters shrouded by rain, Art Deco lights glowing blue in the fog.

What I don’t understand is how someone might think anything’s accomplished by making it appear he was tweeting a woman who clearly couldn’t have been alive while it was going on,” I then say.

How long she’s been dead isn’t going to be clear to everyone.”

You saw her body. What’s left of it.”

It all depends on the interpretation.” He makes his point in a way that’s disturbing, as if it might be one that’s been made before.

The ‘interpretation’?” I repeat rather indignantly. “It’s clear she’s been dead for months.”

Clear to me, but I’m not most people,” Benton says. “It depends on what TV shows they watch. They hear the word mummified and expect she was wrapped in bindings and found in a pyramid.”

I can barely make out the charter school and biotech buildings we pass, the lighting in most parts of Cambridge notoriously bad.

It doesn’t help matters that he was at Logan around the same time you got the anonymous e-mail relating to Emma Shubert’s disappearance.” He gets to that, and nothing would surprise me.

He’s never been to Alberta, Canada, and wouldn’t know the first thing about anonymizing software or proxy servers, Benton.”

As far as anyone knows.”

What possible motivation could he have, even if he were able to?” I ask.

I’m not the one who thinks he might.”

Others think he could have something to do with Emma Shubert.” I want him to spell it out.

Or have something to do with what was e-mailed to you. It’s all part of the same discussion,” he says, and it’s ridiculous, and I tell him that, but I’ve seen ridiculous things before, the wildest of goose chases.

I know better than to dismiss any notion investigators might get into their heads.

I’m worried it’s someone who knows him, Kay.”

These days anybody can know anybody, Benton.”

A paleontologist has vanished and is presumed dead, and you’re sent a photo of a severed ear,” he says. “Mildred Lott has vanished, her husband on trial for her murder, and then his helicopter films you while you’re getting Peggy Stanton’s body out of the bay just hours before you’re supposed to testify. I’m worried whoever’s doing this—”

Whoever? As in one person?”

Connections. There are too many. I don’t believe it’s coincidental.”

You think it’s one person doing all of it?” I ask.

If you want to get away with something, do it by yourself. And I worry this person knows Marino, knows you. Maybe knows all of us.”

It doesn’t have to be someone who knows him or any of us,” I disagree. “If you search Peter Rocco Marino on Twitter you can find him. You can find so much about any of us on the Internet it’s rather terrifying.”

Why would this person look for him on Twitter to begin with? Unless there’s a personal reason to get him into serious trouble?”

Lucy set him up on Twitter in early July. When he moved into his new house,” I recall. “When did he and Pretty Please start tweeting each other?”

He claims she tweeted him first. He says this was late August, close to Labor Day, maybe the weekend before. That she said she was, quote, ‘a fan.’”

A fan of Jeff Bridges’ or of Marino’s?”

Exactly. Because he’s such an idiot,” Benton says. “Using the avatar of a character from some bowling movie, calling himself The Dude. From which Marino instantly concluded that she must be a bowling enthusiast, meaning they have something in common.”

I slow to a stop in Peggy Lynn Stanton’s neighborhood, the headlights shining through rain, illuminating the dark street and the cars lining both sides of it.

I’ll go through all the tweets, his e-mails, his phone records, whatever it takes,” Benton says. “Because I’m the one who will get him out of this mess he’s made, isn’t that the irony?”

Houses are old but not historic or expensive for Cambridge, single-family and occupied, charming and pristinely kept, and so close together it would be difficult for a person to walk between them.

He assumed she bowls, or she said she did?” I ask.

Yards are small or nonexistent, parking coveted. Neighbors would be keenly aware of vehicles that don’t belong here.

I don’t know in detail what was tweeted back and forth between them, but he seems to have the impression she’s an avid bowler. Or was.”

I try to imagine forcing a woman from her house, and I can’t see it. I can’t imagine someone screaming or causing any sort of disturbance that wouldn’t be witnessed. We sit in silence in the drumming rain, distant lightning like a flash going off as thunder rolls. I don’t believe Benton thinks Peggy Lynn Stanton was killed in her house or abducted from it, and I ask him that.

The fact is we don’t know,” he says. “Doug has her own opinion, but it’s not necessarily mine.”

Tell me yours.”

I’ll tell you who.”

Do you have a suspect in mind?”

I know who he is, in his late twenties at least but probably older.” Benton scans where we are on the dark rainy street. “Intelligent, accomplished, blends in but is isolated emotionally. Doesn’t get close. Those who think they know him don’t.”

‘Him’?”

Yes.” Benton looks at cars; he looks at houses. “Familiar with boating. Likely has a boat or access to one.”

I think about Marino’s obsession with the CFC getting a boat, and I wonder who else he’s said this to.

Needs no help operating it, is skillful enough to pilot it alone.”

Benton rolls down his window and stares out at the dark.

A smooth talker, glib, completely confident he can convince anyone of anything, including police, the Coast Guard.”

He’s unmindful of the rain blowing in.

If his boat broke down or he got stopped while he had a dead body on board, he would be certain he could charm and convince and no one would know. Someone fearless. Someone with financial means.”

Marino has a captain’s license issued by the Coast Guard.

A narcissistic sociopath,” Benton says, to the rain and the night. “A sexual sadist whose arousal comes from causing fear, from tormenting, from degrading, from controlling.”

So far I’ve found no evidence of sexual assault,” I let him know.

He doesn’t sexually assault them. He has a physical aversion to his victims because they’re beneath him. He makes sure they know how beneath him they are. Your description of a booby trap is correct, the more I think about it.”

A booby trap intended to pull her apart, to decapitate her, and maybe some or all of the body is lost. Why?” I ask. “Because he doesn’t want her identified?”

Because killing her wasn’t enough. He could kill her every day and it wouldn’t be enough to fill the void in him that was left by some terrible devastation he suffered earlier in life.”

A devastation you know about?”

I know because they’re all different and the same. A monster no one recognizes. Goes about his normal business while he keeps a dead body in a refrigerator or a freezer because he can’t let it go, can’t let go of the fantasy. He has to relive what he did to her constantly. And even when he finally decided to dispose of her, he had to destroy her one last time. He wanted her ripped apart and wanted it witnessed, and intended whoever witnessed it to be shocked and made a fool of. Someone who mocks.”

Benton rolls his window up.

Did he know her?” I ask.

He wipes rainwater off his face with his hands.

He knows who he was killing,” he answers. “Peggy Stanton was just the stand-in. All of his victims are stand-ins. He’s killed before, and he’ll kill again or possibly already has, and he’ll play his games with those involved because it gives him pleasure.”

Wipers sweep water off the glass as I slowly move forward toward the unmarked cars parked just ahead.

The same victim each time. A woman.” Benton zips up his coat. “Most likely an older woman, older than himself. An established, accomplished mature woman. It could be his mother or some other woman who played an overwhelmingly powerful role in his life.”

What you’re describing certainly isn’t an impulse crime.” I notice curtains moving in the houses we pass.

Neighbors are aware of our SUV stopping and then creeping slowly on their street.

You don’t abduct someone or get into a struggle or do much of anything around here without being seen,” I say. “You don’t carry a dead or unconscious body out of the house and load it into a car, doesn’t matter how dark it is. The risk would be enormous.”

What happened to her was calculated.”

Meticulously,” I agree.

There was an encounter, maybe more than one. But they didn’t know each other,” Benton says. “Or at least she didn’t know him.”