The Bone Bed

twenty-three

THE TWO-STORY WHITE COLONIAL IS TUCKED IN ON three sides by homes almost on top of it, the narrow yard in front overgrown with shrubs that obscure first-floor windows and crowd a brick driveway leading to the detached garage. Rain pelts our faces and soaks our hair as we follow a slate walk slick with dead leaves and overgrown with weeds.

The yard work certainly hasn’t been done in recent memory.” I raise my voice over the smacking rain. “I’m surprised if nobody complained, and it’s important to determine which lights have been on all this time and those that haven’t,” I add, because many of the windows are dark.

We hurry up steps to a covered front porch illuminated by a pair of ceiling-mounted glass lanterns, and we take off our dripping coats as the door opens wide. Douglas Burke looks monastic in white hooded coveralls, as if she’s part of some higher order, and she lets us into a small but elegant entryway, a dining room and living room on either side, a staircase curving up to the second floor.

An antique gold pendant chandelier that looks French is lighted over a Persian rug protected by heavy clear plastic, and on top are the suede lace-ups that Burke had on earlier and oxfords that I assume are Machado’s, and boxes and stacks of protective clothing. The air is stagnant and tastes like dust.

If someone grabbed her from this place or killed her here, they didn’t leave any sign of it that I can see.” Burke hands out towels. “But I’m not that kind of expert.”

The way she says it catches my attention.

Did you turn the porch lights on?” Benton dries his face, his hair.

Everything on we turned on. When we got here the house was in a complete blackout. A lot of burned-out bulbs. What a night.” She closes the door. “Hope Noah’s building another ark.”

Drying off my crime scene case, I set it down next to a box of boot covers with PVC soles that one can wear without shoes, and I towel off my dripping hair. I feel clammy and wilted and vaguely self-conscious, sensing something I can’t define that I don’t trust.

Nothing was on when you got here?” Benton is making sure.

The only thing on is me. On Sudafed, and it’s hardly putting a dent. Just the kind of place to make my allergies go wild.” Her eyes are watery, and she sounds congested.

And the neighbors didn’t notice and wonder why her house would be pitch dark?” Benton asks.

Lights burn out gradually and not at the same time? Maybe the neighbors mind their own business or weren’t into minding hers?” Burke supposes, and she’s talking fast, hyped up.

We got a lot of neighbors to interview, but I’m guessing the assumption was she’d left town like she often did. One of these people typical for around here, doesn’t have to work for a living, dabbles in volunteer work and intellectual pursuits. You know the type,” she says to Benton, as if he’s that type, and it’s hard to tell if she’s teasing or flirting or means nothing by it.

Most people leave at least a few lights on.” He continues assessing how much Peggy Stanton kept to herself or encouraged her neighbors to mind their own business, or if she might have been liked or resented or avoided.

Predators pick their victims for a reason.

We’ve been through every room,” Burke lets us know. “Sil’s still roaming around in the basement, says he wants to point out something electrical to you.” She directs this to Benton. “Don’t ask me. I can barely plug in a toaster. Nothing interesting so far, except it’s obvious the place has been empty for several weeks at least.”

Several weeks.

I don’t like the impression I’m getting.

We’ve requested records from the alarm company, which probably will be the best indication of when she was here last,” Burke adds, and I don’t agree.

An indication of when someone was here last doesn’t mean that person was Peggy Stanton,” I remind her. “It could have been someone else who was here.”

I take off my tactical boots, not the same ones I had on earlier today, having insisted on a shower and a change of clothing before I was going anywhere.

And I can tell you with reasonable certainty that she wasn’t here in recent weeks, because she was dead by then. What about a housekeeper?” I ask.

One hasn’t been here for weeks; that’s obvious.”

Weeks, I think, and I don’t like where this is headed already. Burke is going to question any conclusion I make about facts she decides are debatable, and Benton isn’t going to intervene.

Do we know if she has a housekeeper?” I inquire. “Or if, perhaps, she might have cleaned her house herself?”

We don’t know yet. The yard man hasn’t been around, you probably noticed,” she says to me, and my regard for her hasn’t changed over the several years I’ve known her rather distantly.

A former prosecutor, reasonably bright and aggressive, Special Agent Douglas Burke has always been appropriately attentive to the wife of the man she works with most closely and in secret. I like her and I don’t. I’ve never been sure what she honestly thinks of me or feels about my husband, her emotions and interests covert, and right now what I’m starting to sense is strong.

People tend to notice things like that in Cambridge.” Benton wipes down his coat, his shoes with the towel. “If the yard, the maintenance of the property are neglected long enough, inevitably someone calls the city and complains.”

We’re getting that information, too.” Burke hands us coveralls. “We have found out she stopped the newspaper delivery May third.”

Or somebody did.” Benton neatly places his coat and shoes on the plastic-covered safe area. “You can do it online. You abduct someone and don’t want it discovered anytime soon that the person is missing, go online and suspend the newspaper delivery. Make sure you place occasional calls on their cell phone to directory assistance, wherever you’ll get a recording. Or call people from the contact list at weird hours and hang up or don’t leave a message.”

It was her habit to suspend delivery every spring or early summer,” Burke informs us. “Specifically, The Boston Globe, whenever she was leaving Cambridge, and it doesn’t seem she spent summers here after her family was killed in the plane crash. I can’t imagine going through something like that. I can’t even think about it. Losing everybody at once.”

It would have reshaped her. She wouldn’t have been the same person after that, for better or worse.” Benton continues assessing who Peggy Stanton may have become.

If she was at her Lake Michigan cottage, she’d have the Chicago Tribune delivered, but that was never started up this summer.” Burke gives us gloves, and I notice her hands are shaking, probably from the Sudafed, or maybe she’s excited by the hunt.

You want to hunt me, go ahead.

As I’ve indicated, all signs so far point to her never getting to Illinois.” She stares at me and I stare back.

The rug underneath?” I indicate what’s under the plastic as I walk across it in booties.

Nothing’s been done.” She knows what I’m asking.

Any areas of flooring near entrances are important. If a perpetrator was in and out of the house, most likely this person used a door. I would hope Burke and Machado wouldn’t walk on the entrance rug, dripping rainwater and tracking dirt on it. I would hope they wouldn’t cover it with plastic without checking for evidence first. For hairs, fibers, soil, botanical debris, for anything.

You’ve done nothing at all?” I step onto the uncovered floor, noticing the iron umbrella stand in the corner to the right of the door.

In raised letters on its bottom tray is A la Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes, the name of the Paris zoo. Wedged underneath the stand, between the back of it and the wall, is a twisted dark blue plastic ring.

We’ve been here all of an hour. The plan is for us to do the walk-through with you before anything’s disturbed,” Burke explains, as if I’m the one who requested this tour, which really isn’t a tour.

It’s a hunt.

Then Sil will collect evidence if there is any,” she says. “He’ll lift prints if we find them. But I don’t think anyone of interest was in here. I don’t think this is a crime scene. Hard to know at this point who’s been in and out and how recently, and we’ll certainly get those answers, but it’s doubtful they’ll be relevant.”

It’s obvious she’s convinced of that by now, and probably was convinced of it before she got here.

There’s no sign of a struggle, of violence, but you’re the expert,” she says to me the way a defense attorney might. “Nothing seems to be missing in terms of possible robbery. Some rather expensive jewelry in her bedroom, in a dresser drawer, nothing looks rifled through or disturbed. Her car’s locked up in the garage.”

We’ll want to look,” Benton says. “We’ll want to check gauges, check how much gas, check the GPS, if she’s got one.”

Sil’s called for a truck,” Burke says.

Good, because the car shouldn’t be examined here,” I answer. “It should go to the labs, to the evidence bay.”

She asked me here as an expert, and I will be one. I could walk back out the door, but I won’t.

The battery’s probably dead,” Benton comments.

Shit.” Burke dabs her nose with a tissue. “I’m going to claw my eyes out with this goddamn dust.”

What about the car key?” he asks.

On that table there in the bowl, probably where she usually left it.”

A pocketbook, a wallet?” His sharply handsome face is framed in white polypropylene.

No sign of either,” Burke says. “It’s looking like she went somewhere and then whatever happened happened. Of course, we don’t know if she’s a homicide. We don’t know for a fact she met up with foul play, do we, Kay?”

She isn’t asking. She’s testing.

How do you suppose she managed to vanish if she didn’t drive,” I ask pointedly. “She physically left this house at some point. Yet her car key is here? Her car is here?”

The thing is”—Burke watches me crouch near the umbrella stand, looking at the twisted plastic ring without touching it—“we don’t know for a fact that she vanished from Cambridge or even from Massachusetts.”

Except Massachusetts is where her body was found.” I get back up.

She could have been abducted in Florida, in Illinois, who knows where.” She poses it as a hypothetical, and I don’t buy that’s what she thinks.

You’re right. We don’t have all the facts,” I reply. “But her body ended up here. That’s beyond dispute.”

Even so, we just don’t know where she vanished from.” If nothing else, Burke is reminding me why the FBI is involved, reminding me of the Bureau’s jurisdiction when crimes cross state lines, reminding me why it’s justified for me to feel intruded upon and confronted. “She might have left town of her own volition, been in and out, ended up in the area. Maybe she was with someone and died of natural causes and the priority became to dispose of the body for some reason.”

Nothing indicates she died of natural causes,” I assert.

And nothing indicates otherwise,” she pushes back.

Someone likely held her hostage and kept her body in cold storage for months. And then tethered it in such a way that it would be pulled apart when we tried to recover her from the bay. I’d say that’s an indication she didn’t die of natural causes,” I remark.

But you don’t know what killed her, as I understand it?” She lets that same question hang in the air.

At this time I don’t.”

You don’t have a guess.”

I don’t guess.”

Then you don’t know.”

I don’t know for a fact at this point.”

Isn’t that unusual, when the body is in relatively good shape?” Burke hasn’t taken her eyes off me, and it occurs to me she might think I’m lying.

Yes,” I answer. “I find this case extremely complicated and unusual. It’s probably going to be a tox case or asphyxia. It may take a while to sort through it.”

Then we’ll look for anything in here that could point in the direction of an overdose, a poisoning, or asphyxia,” she says. “Drugs, meds, something like a plastic dry-cleaning bag that could have been used to smother her.”

Then what?” I remind her. “Someone carried her body out of here without anybody seeing it and dumped her into the bay?”

I’m hoping you’ll tell me. Cold storage or heat?” Her questions are beginning to feel like an interrogation, as Benton looks around and doesn’t look at us.

Where she was kept was cold,” I reply. “Very cold and dry.”

We just don’t have the facts,” Burke says dismissively, as my boot covers make plastic sounds on heart pine flooring.

Are you allergic to cats?” I ask.

As a matter of fact, horribly. And I thought Benton was the psychic.”

The plastic ring on the floor.” I indicate what’s behind the umbrella stand. “A cat toy.”

No sign, but appears there was one.”

As in recently?” Benton is interested.

There’s a litter box in the master bath,” Burke says. “Water and food bowls are on the kitchen floor.”

But no cat alive or dead?” Benton is caught up in what it might mean.

Not so far.”

Where is her car key now?” I inspect the entryway table, crafted of old distressed wood with hammered copper accents, the bowl high opalescent glass with a pattern of bluebirds.

I pick it up and read the back. Lalique, another expensive antique, and I wonder if Peggy Stanton spent much time in France.

Sil has it. Swabbed it and the keychain for DNA, checking them for possible prints, for anything, before he unlocks her car, assuming the car is locked,” Burke says. “But when the fire guys got us inside, the key was right there in that bowl you’re looking at, what appears to be a key to her 1995 Mercedes. The keychain has an old compass on it, maybe an old Boy Scout compass? Where you’d expect keys to be when someone’s walking into the house. A typical place to put them, just inside the door.”

Except if she’s coming in from the garage she’s not likely to walk all the way around to the front, up the steps, and onto the porch, especially if she’s carrying groceries,” I reply. “There’s a path that leads from the garage to a side door that I’m guessing is the kitchen door.”

Anything else on the keychain besides a car key and a compass?” Benton asks. “A house key, garage key?”

No.”

What about mail?” He looks through doorways, but he doesn’t walk inside the rooms. “I noticed a mailbox in front.”

Empty.”

Was she having her mail forwarded to another address?” I set down the bowl on the smooth top of the hand-built table and don’t believe for a minute that Peggy Stanton kept her car key or any keys in the entryway. “If her mail wasn’t forwarded, the mailbox should be overflowing.”

Nothing in it but a couple of circulars, junk mail,” Burke replies. “So it appears someone was taking it for some reason.”

The same person paying her bills and impersonating her,” Benton says, as if he knows. “What I’d like to do first is check out the garage, walk the property with Machado, then walk through the house while giving Kay room for what she needs. Doug, maybe you can show her around in here.”

What he’s doing is giving me space, but he knows I can’t be alone. I convince myself he’s simply following protocol because I don’t want to believe he’s delivered me to this place and to Douglas Burke so she can casually and spontaneously continue an inquisition I can’t afford to abort.

Looping the camera strap around my neck and picking up my scene case, I tell her for the record that I intend to go through certain areas of the house very thoroughly and it’s important she’s with me the entire time. I won’t open drawers or look inside medicine cabinets or closets unless what I do is witnessed, and I won’t collect any evidence myself unless it directly relates to the body, I explain.

Biological materials, medications, for example, I say to her. But I will look at whatever I’m allowed to look at, assuming my opinion is helpful, I make myself clear.

Sure, it’s all helpful,” she says. “I’m curious if you usually do your own photography.”

Generally, no.”

So if Marino’s not available, you wouldn’t bring one of the other investigators. You have what? About six of them?”

I wouldn’t bring Marino or anyone here,” I answer her. “Not under the circumstances.”