The Bone Bed

twenty-five

THERE IS NOTHING INSIDE BUT CONDIMENTS AND SUGARLESS fruit preserves. No juice or milk or food with an expiration date that might be helpful, and either Peggy Stanton cleaned out her refrigerator because she was leaving town or someone else did for another reason, a malignant one. I feel Burke watching my every move, my every facial expression.

She’s dissecting me, picking at every part of me, and I’m allowing it. Like any determined investigator, she’ll go as far as I let her, and she has other motives, and maybe pseudoephedrine is having its way with her, is making her overly aggressive.

You’ve known him about half your life, haven’t you, Kay.”

I step on the metal trash bin’s foot pedal and find nothing inside but an empty bag. I open a cabinet under the sink and pull out an open box of kitchen trash bags and set it on the counter.

Maybe someone emptied the trash,” I explain. “Maybe someone other than her. Maybe someone who came in here to do a number of things.”

He has quite the temper, has been through rehab, and in recent months started drinking again.” Burke isn’t looking at anything except me as she stands near the door, her arms folded across her chest.

This should be checked for prints, for DNA. If you don’t want to collect it, I will.” I retrieve a paper bag from my case and collect the evidence myself.

He started drinking again about the time he started tweeting Peggy Stanton.”

She was dead by Labor Day.” Next I collect the empty bag lining the trash can. “She was dead long before then.”

When did you become aware that Marino had started drinking again?”

I don’t know for a fact if and when Marino started drinking again.”

She was dead long before Labor Day? You’re absolutely sure of that?”

I tell her I am.

And how you arrived at what you seem to believe is gospel I simply find confusing.” She’s typing on her phone again. “In fact, it’s about as subjective as three blind people describing an elephant.”

Time of death is dependent on many factors, and it’s complicated.” I won’t give her the satisfaction of making me defensive.

Tell me why you’re so sure this lady’s been dead since the spring. Tell me why, based on information other than dates on magazines and how wilted the flowers are or how many burned-out lights there are or how overgrown the yard is.”

I check the gas burners on the stovetop, and they flame up.

The lack of insect damage, the mold on her face and neck, and decomposition of organs, and her core body temperature are indications that she was stored in a closed structure where the air was dry and very cold,” I tell her again. “Possibly she was frozen.”

According to articles I’ve looked at, complete mummification can occur in as little as two weeks. So it really is rather up for grabs how long this lady’s been dead.”

It really isn’t.”

You say months. Someone else says weeks.”

I open the pantry and find nothing that wouldn’t keep. The usual canned goods, all of them sodium-free, and whole-grain cereals, rice, and pasta.

It requires more than surfing the Internet to have an informed opinion.” I let her know someone is doing just that, probably whoever is sending the e-mails.

I’m sure I could find experts with your level of training who might have opinions very different from yours.” I’ve made her angry.

I’m sure you could.” I feel her eyes on my back. “That doesn’t mean those opinions would be correct.”

It appears Peggy Stanton ate a lot of salads. A shelf is filled with bottles of fat-free Italian dressing, what must be two dozen bottles that were on special at Whole Foods. I shut the pantry door.

A lady who was cautious and took good care of herself and her cat. She was frugal. She tightly controlled the world she had left.

Two weeks.” I consider what Burke said earlier. “Cases of a body completely mummifying in two weeks? That’s very interesting.”

It’s in the literature.” She’s openly argumentative, and it’s better that way.

It’s easier. Let her skim through whatever lands in her inbox and hammer away.

And where might this have been? Where human remains were completely desiccated after only two weeks?” I walk out of the kitchen.

I certainly can’t tell you exactly where. Only that it’s possible.”

If you’re talking about the Sahara Desert, I suppose.” I head upstairs. “The hottest desert on the planet, and a body in those conditions will have some seventy percent loss of volume through dehydration in no time at all. It will be as dried out as beef jerky.”

Burke is right behind me.

A hundred-and-forty-pound person who becomes completely mummified will weigh maybe forty pounds, will be leather over bones, hard dried-out skin that splits,” I let her know. “That’s what extreme heat and aridness does. It’s not something you find around here.”

People are creative. Especially if they’re experts, if it’s what they do professionally.” Of course she means Marino. “Experts in death investigation and all associated forensic evidence.”

A guest room is on the left of the landing, and straight ahead through an open door is the master bedroom. I ignore what she’s so blatant about.

You were quoted all over the news for saying in court today that it would have taken months for Mildred Lott’s body to turn to soap.” Burke brings this in, and I’m not surprised, and I wonder if that’s been e-mailed to her, too. “You said one of the requirements is submersion in cold water.”

The queen-size bed is canopied, the black-and-white damask duvet smooth and neatly tucked under three pillows. The one nearest the bedside table where the phone is plugged in has been plumped but is wrinkled, the way pillows look when they’ve been slept on.

But they’ve also found this same soaplike condition when bodies have been sealed in watertight coffins and vaults, isn’t that correct?” Burke isn’t going to quit, and she should. “Bodies forming adipocere when there’s no water.”

Watertight isn’t always as advertised,” I reply.

You seem to believe you’re infallible.”

Nobody is infallible. But a lot of people are misinformed.”

I pull back the duvet, and the sheets and pillows underneath are perfectly smooth on one side of the bed and wrinkled on the side near the phone. I notice cat fur that looks short and grayish-white.

The linens weren’t changed after whoever slept in here last.” I continue taking photographs of everything I look at. “Someone slept or lay down on the right side of the bed next to the phone. It appears the cat was in the bed at some point. I’d like to check the bedside drawer.”

A night guard in a blue plastic container is labeled with the name and address of the West Palm Beach dentist who caused Peggy Stanton so much damage and unnecessary expense. I set two prescription bottles on the table and photograph them, then place them in separate plastic evidence bags.

Muscle relaxers prescribed by her dentist, Dr. Pulling,” I let Burke know. “Any meds should go in to the labs. And I’d like to collect the night guards. Dr. Adams might want to take a look at them.”

What I’m getting at, Kay, and what I need you to objectively comment on—” she starts to say, and I cut her off.

Why would you assume I might be anything other than objective?” I open the closet door.

I’m sure you can imagine why I might be concerned.” Her tone is no longer accusing or hostile, but sympathetic, as if she can well understand why I would cover for Marino, why I might slant or even falsify autopsy findings for him.

I run my gloved hands through the clothing on hangers, a lot of pantsuits and slacks and blouses that are prim and old-fashioned, with hanging cedar planks spaced along the rod. I don’t see a dress or a skirt, and no blazers or jackets have antique military buttons or even distinctive ones.

You care about him,” Burke says, as if it’s a good thing.

Peggy Stanton lost her family and never moved beyond it, everything old and the same, the future she looked forward to crashing with that plane. Her existence was rigidly maintained and obsessively protected, and it’s hard for me to imagine she was on Twitter.

I’m wondering if you’ve come across a computer?” I ask.

Not yet.”

Photographs displayed on tables and dressers are of an era when Peggy Stanton had people in her life she loved, her husband a pleasant-looking man with mischievous dark eyes and a lock of dark hair falling over his brow, the two girls into horses and swimming, one of them into airplanes. None of the photographs is recent. Peggy Stanton isn’t in any of them.

If she has no computer, how was she on Twitter?” I ask.

Maybe a laptop she took with her. Maybe her phone, her iPad, whatever she had with her when she left here.”

I see nothing to suggest she was interested in technology,” I reply. “In fact, quite to the contrary, if you look at the old TV in here, at the princess phone.”

I open another closet, where button-up sweaters are folded on shelves with cedar blocks tucked between them, and shoes arranged on a rack on the floor are crepe-soled and low-heeled, made for comfort, not style. I’m not surprised that Peggy Stanton’s hair was prematurely white and that she didn’t bother to dye or style it or that her nail polish was an understated pale pink, almost flesh-colored. I see nothing to indicate she made any effort to be alluring or attractive beyond what the dentist did to her, and I suspect she was talked into those procedures.

No Tulle or Audrey Marybeth or Peruvian Connection, not a single label like that.” I look at a men’s outback hat box, thick with dust, on the closet floor, PHOTOGRAPHS printed in neat block letters on the lid. “Most of her clothing is size eight or ten, not size six. I’d like to open this.”

Inside are framed photographs that I look through, all of them of her, a pretty woman with jet-black hair and dark sparkling eyes, vibrant and not at all the way I have imagined her after examining her dead body and now her belongings. In riding clothes, and hiking and kayaking, and a picture of her in Paris when she must have been in her twenties, someone adventuresome and full of life before her world stopped.

I seriously doubt she was looking for a romantic relationship or was the sort to connect with a stranger on the Internet who called himself The Dude,” I remark. “There’s not the slightest suggestion she was an avid bowler, no bowling shoes or balls or trophies, I assume? And no clothing or jewelry I’ve seen in photographs is remotely similar to what the body had on. It doesn’t appear to be the right size. It would have been too small for her, at least when she was alive and not mummified.”

What I’m just wondering is if the conditions necessary for a body to mummify rapidly might be manufactured,” Burke says.

Whatever she had on when she was abducted or vanished,” I add, “isn’t what she was wearing in the bay. She was dressed. She was staged. Someone did it for a reason.”

For his pleasure. I think of what Benton said. The killer choreographs what makes him feel important and powerful. Whatever it is, he plays it out with victims who have nothing to do with him. They aren’t who he’s kidnapping and killing.

Might mummification be induced artificially?” Burke says, and I know what she wants.

You mean if the body were placed inside a very hot, dry space, for example”—I give her the pitch she’s waiting for—“and left to dehydrate?”

I walk into the bathroom, black and white subway tile and a claw-foot tub with brass cross-handled faucets.

Which would require having access to such a place and feeling confident what you’re doing wouldn’t be discovered.” I lead her down the path she’s already on.

Isn’t it true that mummification in a closed structure that’s hot and dry could occur in as few as eleven days?” She lets me know what I’ve by now deduced is her theory. “What if the person installed a sauna in his basement? Couldn’t that work?”

You mean the way Marino did?”

Yes,” she says. “The way he did when he bought his house this past summer.”

You mean the sauna he built from a kit that can fit one person sitting up on a bench not much wider than a toilet seat?”

The shower stall is the same tile, and bars of soap are dried out, and nothing looks recently used. I open the mirrored medicine cabinet door over the marble shell pedestal sink, the handles and fittings malachite and bronze.

That rather horrible little sweatbox that looks like a Porta-John?” I ask.

She has more night guards, each from the same West Palm Beach dentist.

A sauna that’s on a sixty-minute timer so one is constantly having to reset it?” I continue, and Burke is silent in the doorway.

I pick up prescription bottles, more muscle relaxers, Flexeril, Norflex, and the anti-inflammatory drugs Vioxx and Celebrex. She was taking the antidepressant nortriptyline, all of the medications prescribed by this dentist, Dr. Pulling, and consistent with treatments for the temporomandibular joint and muscle disorder known as TMJ.

She had a bad case of it. She would have suffered chronic pain. She was in a vortex of getting dental work done to relieve a wretched condition that can cause the jaw to lock or dislocate and the ears to ring and a constant ache that radiates down the neck and shoulders and debilitates.

So I guess he dehydrated her slowly, running downstairs on the hour to reset the infrared heater, including last week, when he was out of town, in Florida?” I’m careful not to sound sarcastic. “And by the way, that kit he bought because he thought it would help him lose weight would mean the body was propped up in a sitting position.”

I walk out of the bedroom.

She would have desiccated, dried out in that position.” I keep talking as I go down the stairs and Burke is behind me. “And if the body was straightened, such as by weights or floats pulling on it when it was tethered in the water? Tension at the joints and the skin’s going to split. She has no skin splitting, and her core body temperature was colder than the bay, which isn’t possible unless the body was refrigerated, possibly frozen.”

We are back in the entryway. I stop near the table with the glass bowl, where I’m sure Peggy Stanton never kept her car key, and Burke and I face each other, hooded and in white, with no pretenses or cordiality.

He assaulted you five years ago in Charleston, South Carolina.” She fires the shot she’s saved. “He came to your house late at night and tried to rape you, and you never reported it to the police.”

There’s a note of triumph in her voice, and I’m sure I’m not imagining it.

Why would you tell us anything now that might get him into trouble if you refused to do it then, after what he did?” she says.

You don’t know the facts.” I hear footsteps on the front porch.

I’m asking you for them.”

I don’t answer, because I won’t.

Are you aware of what the statute of limitations for sexual assault is in South Carolina?”

I’m not.”

You haven’t exceeded it,” she says.

It’s not relevant.”

So you’re still protecting him.”

You don’t have the facts,” I repeat.

Here’s a fact. He used to be into treasure hunting. Yet something else you know about him,” Burke says, and it’s what she’s been waiting to do.

It’s why I’m here inside this house with you.

And Peggy Stanton had Civil War buttons on her jacket. Did Marino bother to mention to you that he’d been tweeting a woman who collected antique buttons?”

I’ve seen no evidence of an antique-button collection in this house,” I answer, with no emotion she can detect.

You’re not going to talk to me about what he did to you.”

I’m not.”

Do you understand the problem I’m having? And it’s not as if I enjoy bringing this up. I’m sorry—” Douglas Burke starts to say, as the front door opens wide and rain blows in.

Benton is carrying something wrapped in a towel.

If he’d really attempted to rape me, I can assure you he would have succeeded.” I don’t care who hears. “Pete Marino is a very big man, and at the time this occurred, he was armed. So if he’d intended to physically overpower me or put a gun to my head to make me do what he wanted, he could have. But he didn’t. He stopped what should never have started. But he stopped.”

Benton and Machado drip on the plastic-covered rug beneath the French chandelier, and the towel is dirty and wet, and I notice gray fur peeking out.

A broken-out window with no screen,” Machado says, and what he just overheard seems etched in the air. “You know, near the ground, and the garage doesn’t have an alarm, maybe the cat somehow pushed it open and pushed out the screen. So I guess it’s been in and out of the garage all this time, made a bed in a box in there. Probably plenty to eat around here, or maybe people were feeding it.”

I take the cat from Benton, short-haired gray-and-white, with gold eyes and flat ears, a Scottish Fold that looks like an owl, the flea collar around its neck faded and old.

No tag,” Benton says, and the look he gives Burke is piercing.

Obviously an indoor cat. A girl. What’s your name?” I wrap her in a clean towel, and she doesn’t resist me. “I see. You’re not going to say.”

She’s thin and dirty but seems in relatively good shape, her claws very long and curled and needle-sharp.

Well, it didn’t get out of the house on its own.” Benton looks at me, and he knows what just happened. “And she certainly wouldn’t have abandoned it.”

Peggy Stanton wouldn’t have put her cat outdoors and then left town, and his rage is simmering.

So who let her cat out?” He pulls off his white hood and runs his fingers through his hair. “Someone who has no regard for human life but wouldn’t hurt an animal.” He bends over to take off his boot covers. “Had it been left in the house, it would have starved to death. So he came back. He let himself in. He knew her alarm code. And he had her keys.”

There was an open bag of treats on the counter.” The cat has tucked its head under my chin and is purring. “Treats to lure her so he could let her out, perhaps?”

Where are these treats?” Machado takes off his boot covers, and they are wet and dirty from walking outside.

I indicate the bags of evidence I’ve set on the entryway table.

If he needed to lure the cat, then he wasn’t someone familiar,” Benton says.

Did she run from you?” I ask.

Came right up to us when we were inside the garage.”

Well, she seems very friendly but maybe wasn’t with him. Maybe she sensed something that made her wary,” I reply, as I wonder what I’m going to do with her.

I’m not leaving her here.

It looks like the electrical panel was recently modified.” Benton says this to me and ignores Douglas Burke, and I know when he’s seething. “A subpanel that doesn’t meet code. In the basement.”

Hooked up to what?” The cat rubs against my ear, purring.

To nothing. No slots left in the main panel. It looks like she had someone come in, maybe a handyman, maybe an electrician, but what was done is substandard. It appears she intended to install something that would need to be connected to a breaker.” Benton won’t look at Burke, practically has his back to her. “A new cable runs from the subpanel along the wall to a new outlet.”

Work that’s recent; how recent?” Burke asks, and it’s Machado who answers, but he doesn’t answer her.

He explains to me that there is a work area in the basement, a large table with paintbrushes, cookie cutters, wooden utensils, and a rolling pin.

Like she was going to do baking down there,” she says, and he describes a portable sink on casters, and I don’t know what he means.

A portable sink?” I puzzle. “Connected to a faucet? Why would she bake in the basement? Why not use her kitchen?”

More like a plastic basin on a stand with wheels. I can show you if you want,” Machado says.

Yes, before I take all this off.” I mean the protective clothing. “She doesn’t seem to mind my holding her, so I don’t think she’ll mind if we look. There’s a basement door that leads outside?”

What the firefighters came in.”

We can go down and then out from there.”

The sink or basin looks pretty new, right there in the area where the new outlet is.” He puts on clean boot covers. “Lots of pieces of cut wire scattered around. Black, white, green, number-six wire like you’d hook up to a pole circuit, to the neutral and ground bars,” he explains. “But whatever she planned to hook up, she didn’t get around to it. I’m thinking maybe she was going to put in an oven, but I agree it’s a strange place to bake cookies or whatever. We need to find who did that electrical work.”