The Bone Bed

twenty-four

OFF THE ENTRYWAY TO THE LEFT IS THE DINING ROOM, small, with Wedgwood-blue walls and white molding and trim, the mahogany table in front of the fireplace set with six antique chairs upholstered in dark red velvet.

A built-in hutch displays royal-blue dishes trimmed in gold, French Saxon china that is old, and sterling flatware in cabinets, also French and antique, is stored in wooden chests, a patina of tarnish on all of the pieces. White candles on the table and the mantel have never been lit, and potted plants by the curtained window are long dead, everything covered in dust that hasn’t been disturbed in many months, I estimate. I flip a wall switch and nothing happens, the bulbs of the chandelier and sconces burned out.

It doesn’t appear they’re on timers.” I scan wall switches and outlets, looking for any sign of power strips or other devices that might have allowed Peggy Stanton to program certain lights to turn on and off. “Were these switches in the on position when you got here?”

Yes.” Burke is interested in her cell phone.

And you left them in the on position?” I ask because it’s important.

Any lights that are burned out, it’s because they were left on by whoever was in the house last.” She’s scrolling through e-mails.

It’s probably safe to assume that either she left the dining room lights on the last time she was in her house or someone else did.”

The window in here faces the street.” She’s reading e-mails and wiping her nose with a tissue. “Maybe she was in the habit of leaving the lights on in the dining room so it looked like someone was home.”

Most people wouldn’t leave on a crystal chandelier and crystal sconces when they go out, especially if they were leaving town. It’s a real pain to replace the bulbs.” I’ve seen what I need to see in here, and Burke is barely listening.

I walk out of the dining room and across the entryway, waiting for what’s next as I wonder how much of what’s happening was masterminded by Benton. How much is he allowing? Burke is walking me through this house because she intends to walk me through something else.

If it was her habit to come and go in her car, it might have made more sense to leave lights on that illuminate the garage.” I tell her my thoughts anyway, feeling uncannily the way I did earlier today when Jill Donoghue played her games with me in court.

I stop by the floral upholstered couch in the formal living room and look around at more European antiques, probably French, everything immaculate and dusty. I notice a canvas bag on the floor next to a wing chair, and inside are skeins of wool and knitting needles, and a navy blue scarf that looks about halfway done. If she’d left town for the summer, would she have neglected to take with her a project she’d begun? The fireplace is fitted with a gas insert that’s supposed to look like birch logs, a remote on top of the mantel.

The fireplace works; I checked,” Burke says.

Most people shut off the pilot light in the summer and turn it back on in the fall. Is her house heated with natural gas? It’s warm in here.” I find the thermostat. “The heat is on and set to seventy degrees.”

Not sure if it’s natural gas.”

Most likely it is. Pilot lights burn gas, too. You leave one on for five or six months and chances are good the gas will run out. So she’s been getting fuel deliveries.”

Someone collecting her mail, paying her bills, making sure gas deliveries don’t stop, and suspending her newspaper.” She doesn’t indicate what that makes her think or even if she finds it noteworthy. “I don’t mean to tell you how to do your job.”

That’s good, because you couldn’t possibly.”

I don’t mean to question you.”

Of course you do. But go right ahead.” I look at flowers on the coffee table that are so wilted it’s difficult to tell what they once were.

You’re sure she didn’t die in the bay?”

She didn’t.” Possibly tulips and lilies, which I associate with spring, an empty plastic card holder stuck in the vase.

No way she was tied up, thrown overboard, and drowned?”

There’s no way,” I reply. “She was already dead when she was tied up. If she were leaving town for the summer, would she leave a fresh flower arrangement on a table? Why not throw it out?”

And she was in the water how long?” Burke isn’t interested in the flowers.

I’d estimate her body hadn’t been in the water even twenty-four hours by the time she was found.”

Estimate based on what? If you don’t mind my asking.”

I don’t mind,” I answer, because it doesn’t matter if I do, and I’m certain she will ask whatever she wants, and I wonder if she’s slept with my husband.

I wonder how much of this is competitive and personal.

My estimate is based on there being no evidence of significant immersion changes or marine depredation, for example,” I explain.

‘Marine depredation’?”

Fish, crabs. Nothing had started eating her.”

Right. So she died somewhere else.”

Yes, she did.”

Your thoughts based on the autopsy?”

I think she likely was held hostage someplace she attempted to escape from,” I reply. “Her postmortem findings indicate she’s been dead for months.”

Any chance she’s not been dead as long as you think?” Burke studies me as if I’m a puzzle she can take apart and reconstruct.

I’m not sure how long she’s been dead,” I reply. “Not down to the week or day or hour, if that’s the answer you want. But based on what I’m seeing so far, it appears to me she hasn’t been home since it was still cool enough to keep the heat on. Around here, that would be last March or April. I assume there was no card in this floral arrangement?”

I didn’t touch it, and Sil wouldn’t have. So apparently not.” She pinches her nose together with the tissue and looks miserable and irritable.

Do we know when these flowers were delivered or by whom?”

We’ll be checking area florists to see if there’s a record of a delivery,” she says. “And we’ll check her credit card bills to see if she might have bought the flowers herself.”

I wonder if someone was paying those, too.”

Someone who had access to her bank account. Someone who had her checks,” Burke says. “Wouldn’t be anyone in her family. Her family’s dead.”

Most people don’t remove the card from the arrangement and throw it away. Not if the flowers came from someone who’s significant to them.”

I haven’t checked the trash yet.”

To answer your question as definitively as I can?” I look through magazines on the coffee table. “Based on the condition of her body, I’m estimating she’s been dead for many months.”

Antiques & Collecting, Antique Trader, Smithsonian from December through April.

Knowing for a fact how long is really important,” Burke says, and that’s what she wants from me and intends to dispute because she has her mind made up about what she’s looking for and what she believes she can prove.

Some theory that at the moment I can’t fathom, but I have no doubt I wasn’t asked to do a walk-through of this house for the reasons I assumed. I’m not here to check for evidence of violence, for asphyxia or a drug overdose. I’m here because of Marino.

He is what Burke wants to ask about, and I have a leaden feeling of inevitability, a sense of something dark and heavy spreading over me that I can’t escape, don’t even dare to run from, because it will only be worse if I do. I know what she’s walking me deeper into, and Benton saw it coming. He warned me in his own way while we were driving here. Burke is aware of details about Marino’s past that aren’t found in searchable records.

Months? Two, three, five months? How does this work when you look at a dead body and calculate?” she asks, and I do the best I can to explain what isn’t simple as I walk into a kitchen dominated by an antique oak table and handmade iron chandelier.

Double porcelain sinks are empty and dry, the bistro coffeemaker unplugged and clean, and blinds are shut in windows on either side of the door that leads out to the garage. She follows me, lets me lead the way, scarcely attending to what I say as she continues to check her phone and probe, carrying on with what feels like a chipping away of who and what I am. I can’t help but feel betrayed. I can’t help but feel Benton chose the side he’s on and it isn’t my side, and at the same time I completely understand and would suspect nothing less from him.

The FBI is doing its job the same way I do mine, and Burke can ask anything she wants without Mirandizing me because I’m not in police custody. I’m not a suspect in a crime or even a person of interest. Marino is. I could stop Douglas Burke at any time, but that would only further galvanize her suspicions about him.

It’s impossible to precisely determine how rapidly a body desiccates unless you know the conditions.” I explain mummification as she continues to question whatever I say about it. “How hot? How cold? How humid? The name Stanton isn’t French.” I look around. “Antiques and certain other items in this house are French and quite fine and somewhat unique. What was her family name?”

Margaret Lynette Bernard. Peggy Lynn. Born on January twelfth, 1963, in New York. Father was a French antiques dealer with shops in New York, Paris, London. She grew up in the city, was working on her master’s degree in social work at Columbia but didn’t finish, presumably because she got married and started a family.”

She’s been doing research, digging into records, covering a lifetime of history in the blink of an eye or in the keystrokes of a cyber-expert like Valerie Hahn, who is conspicuously absent, it crosses my mind. E-mails seem to be landing nonstop on Burke’s phone.

All that sacrifice. Look what she gave up for him, and the guy decides to fly in bad conditions.” She stands in one spot, her watery eyes on me. “Pilot error.” She sneezes, and I think of the irony.

The FBI’s DNA, not Marino’s, will be all over the house.

That’s the NTSB’s conclusion or yours?” I inquire.

Took off in an overloaded aircraft, failed to maintain airspeed, possible the nine-year-old daughter, Sally, might have been at the controls—”

A nine-year-old child was flying the plane?”

She’d been taking lessons, apparently was quite skilled, a lot of media attention about the latest little Amelia Earhart.”

Live feeds from headquarters, I think. Search engines chugging through the news and downloading it to Burke so she can ambush me while she’s got the chance. I could walk out, leave.

Anyway, the plane went into a stall after taking off from Nantucket. One hundred percent pilot error. One hundred percent parental error.” Burke says it judgmentally.

That’s very sad. I’m sure a father would never mean to make such an error,” I reply. “And what did Peggy Lynn do in life after her entire family was gone?”

It appears she received a few public-service awards that made the news,” Burke says. “Volunteer work with the elderly, teaching them hobbies, arts and crafts. Exactly how long do you think she’s been dead?” she asks, as if I’ve yet to answer that.

The black granite countertop is neat and mostly bare, a pad of paper and a pen next to the phone, and I notice a six-ounce pouch of salmon-flavored cat treats that has been torn open and resealed.

I think this should be collected.” I nudge the cat treats with my gloved finger, and the space beneath it is free of dust.

Burke stares at the bag on the counter without stepping closer, a blank expression on her splotchy face.

The cat appears to be missing,” I remind her. “And it appears someone gave it treats, which suggests the cat wasn’t missing while the house was still occupied.”

She would have taken the cat with her wherever she went when she left here.” Her voice is nasal. “And she obviously left here, and I would say willingly as opposed to having been abducted. And it’s obvious that when she left this house she wasn’t coming back for a while.” She fires this off at me as if I’m trying her patience and have about used it up.

So she left with her cat but without her car, possibly for Illinois or Florida, and along the way something happened that ended with her being dumped in the bay,” I summarize what is illogical.

We can’t assume she wasn’t meeting up with someone.” She pulls a fresh tissue out of her Tyvek sleeve. “Someone who perhaps picked her up, which is why her car’s still here. That maybe she got involved with the wrong person, someone she met on the Internet, for example.”

The cat bowls are on a mat on the floor near the door leading outside, and one is empty, and the other has a hard residue, what’s left of wet food.

You’ve known Pete Marino a long time,” Burke says.

I would collect it,” I repeat my suggestion about the cat treats. “It strikes me as out of place. Nothing else is left out and opened. It should go to the labs to be checked for fingerprints, for DNA. It’s best you don’t touch it.”

She’s wiping her nose and sneezing. Her gloves aren’t clean.

Benton’s told me a little bit about him.” She intends to ignore me about the cat, and I won’t let her.

One dish is empty because the water would have evaporated,” I continue. “The other dish had food in it and wasn’t washed. Sometimes it’s the one little thing that doesn’t seem to matter.”

A troubled volatile marriage. Abusive to his wife.”

I’m not aware he was abusive to Doris. Not physically,” I say, and I can’t imagine Doris’s shock if she picked up the phone or opened her door and the FBI was there to question her about Marino.

A son who was involved in organized crime and was murdered in Poland.” Burke is looking at her phone.

I can take care of the bag myself, but I prefer not to because it’s not related to the body, it’s not biological, and I open my scene case. Burke has left me no choice. I collect the cat treats and label the bag and initial it.

You shouldn’t dismiss the possibility that whoever might be responsible for what happened to her has been inside this house after the fact.” I continue thinking about the missing house keys and pocketbook. I think about a car key left in an expensive antique Lalique bowl where someone fastidious about her belongings would never keep keys or any items that might break or scratch delicate glass or polished old wood.

The case in Virginia about nine years ago, by which time Marino was working for you.” Burke is relentless, not the least bit subtle about it anymore. “You returned to Richmond, were called in as a consultant on the unsolved death of a little girl named Gilly Paulsson.”

So now the search engines have found that, I think.

While you and Marino were there he had a problem,” she says.

That wouldn’t be on the Internet, and it’s unlikely Marino told her. Maybe Benton did. It’s also possible Gilly Paulsson’s mother has been questioned already, I suppose. Lucy knows what Marino was accused of, but she would never talk to Douglas Burke or give her the time of day.

A charge that was proven to be completely unfounded.” I try not to be too adamant or show my anticipation of what I’m certain is next.

No report was ever filed with the police.” Burke types another e-mail.

There was no report because it was a groundless accusation made by a disturbed individual who Marino was unwise enough to get involved with,” I tell her.

It seems he’s done his share of unwise things.”

If you look at most people’s relationships, they include a lot of unwise things.”

I don’t think his list is exactly typical.”

No, it probably isn’t.” I open the refrigerator door.