The Bone Bed

forty

SHE MATERIALIZES OUT OF FLASHING BRIGHT LIGHTS and darkness, emerging from behind my SUV, where I realize a black Maserati is parked, its big engine rumbling throatily. She asks if I’m all right, and I tell her I’m fine, and I don’t know her and I do.

He might just kill him. All right, Marino. That’s enough. Not that I blame him.” She’s staring in the direction of the warehouse, and I’m staring at her face. “You sure you’re okay? Let’s get you in the back of a cruiser and I’ll find something for your feet.”

She’s cut her hair quite short, and it looks more blond than brown, still very pretty but older, mid-thirties, about Lucy’s age. When I saw her last she was barely twenty, and she puts an arm around me and walks me to Sil Machado’s Crown Vic as he’s boiling out of it. I climb into the backseat and sit with the door wide open, and I rub my feet.

I guess someone will explain things,” I say to Janet.

The last time I saw her must have been fifteen years ago, when she and Lucy were sharing an apartment in Washington, D.C. Lucy was ATF and Janet was FBI. I always liked her. They were good together, and nothing’s been all that good for Lucy ever since.

I notice you don’t seem to have a gun handy, don’t seem to be looking to arrest anyone,” I say to her, “and I’m sorry if I’m bleary. If only my head would fall off. Maybe then it would stop hurting.”

I’m not with the Bureau anymore, not even a cop,” Janet says. “A lawyer, one of those awful people, only worse. I specialize in environmental law, so I’m pretty much hated.”

Just don’t adopt a pig. Lucy’s been threatening it. And it will be me taking care of it when she’s out of town, which is often.”

I guess you don’t know what he did with your shoes.”

There should be a box of boot covers in the back.” I point at the SUV I was just held hostage in, and it occurs to me that all the CFC vehicles are equipped with satellite locators. “The ones with PVC soles so I can walk around in them,” I say to her. “You followed me here. But why?”

You texted Lucy you would call her as soon as you got in the car,” she says. “And you didn’t.”

And that was enough for her to start tracking me?”

She does it more than you think. Tracks you, me, pretty much everyone. And she could see you were at Fayth House and then were heading toward Boston instead of toward home. Plus, you’d left some rather urgent messages for Benton.”

She explains to me that they were very close to Fayth House anyway, taking Marino back to his Cambridge house, and were talking about the significance of Mildred Lott going out in the dark.

She thought she heard Jasmine in the backyard,” Janet says. “She was calling out the name of her dog.”

I’m aware that Lucy has been working with British and German researchers on computer-based lip-reading technology, and Janet says the software is now good enough to use when people are turned as much as a hundred and sixty degrees sideways. In other words, you can barely see their mouths moving but the computer does.

And she was turned away from the camera, looking in the direction of where she heard whatever she heard,” Janet says. “The security camera caught her from the side only, and it sort of does look, a little bit, at least, like she’s saying her husband’s name.”

I’m searching for Benton, wondering if he’s here. He must have alerted agents, the police, and if so, I know what that means. He found out what I feared is true. Douglas Burke came here to do battle with Channing Lott, whose shipping headquarters looms in the distance beyond the dry-docked hospital ship, a huge white prewar building with hundreds of windows, most of them dark at this hour.

I could see someone like a prosecutor thinking that or wanting to think it,” Janet is saying. “Not Channing but Jasmine. She was calling her dog and looked really happy, thrilled and excited but frantic, and now we know why.”

My feet aren’t numb anymore, and now they’re itching.

Not exactly,” I reply. “Why did she think her dog was out there?”

Either he had the dog with him or more likely he had a recording,” she says. “If he stole the dog days earlier and recorded it barking.”

I continue to rub my feet as Janet walks over to the SUV and opens the tailgate.

Try one of the big orange cases,” I call out to her, and police are everywhere, and Al Galbraith is in cuffs and is being placed in the back of an FBI sedan.

I look around at Boston cops and agents and Machado, and then I see Benton with uniformed officers who are breaching the entrance of the warehouse. What I don’t see is any sign of Douglas Burke. Three loud thuds of a lightweight battering ram and the door gives and is opened, and there are lights on inside a cavernous open space where I can see rows of shiny steel machines on wheels and coils of hoses and hundreds of wooden barrels stacked against a far wall.

Benton and the others approach a shut metal door, and I can make out the reddish tint to the floor and hear what sounds like steam blasting. I remember Burke’s accusatory comments about Crystal Carbon2, a green way to do industrial cleaning. Solid carbon-dioxide blasting, she said. Compressed air propelling dry-ice pellets at supersonic speeds, and carbon dioxide is one of the simplest and most common asphyxiants known.

Colorless, odorless, it is one and a half times heavier than air, so it flows downslope and settles, displacing oxygen. In a confined space at a concentration of ten percent a person loses consciousness in less than a minute and will asphyxiate, and Al Galbraith was right.

Nothing will show up on autopsy, not a damn thing, unless the person is burned. At more than minus one hundred degrees Fahrenheit dry ice causes frostbite, is so cold it may as well be hot, and I think of the strange hard brown areas on Peggy Stanton’s arm and feet and her broken nails and ripped pantyhose.

He locked her in that room behind that shut metal door and turned on a machine, and she knew she was going to die if she couldn’t turn it off. She got close to the white fog blasting out of the nozzle, reached for it, kicked at it, and it burned her. I imagine her darting about, banging on the door, clawing at the nylon hose that weren’t hers, maybe wrapping her hands in shreds of stockings to protect her skin as she tried again, and the concentration of CO2 rose.

Janet returns with boot covers, and I pull them on, frustrated that I don’t have my phone. I get out of the car and awkwardly trot, my feet still not quite belonging to me, it seems. I head toward the warehouse, where all the trucks are parked, and the sound of compressed air blasting is coming from behind the closed metal door, and it must be locked because the police have the battering ram ready.

Red woody fibers are like a fine coating of soil or dirt on wire shelves arranged with accessories. Hoses, nozzles, insulated gloves, and the fine debris coats stainless-steel surfaces of blasting machines and scores of hard case insulated coolers and containers, what the dry-ice pellets likely are shipped in.

You’re going to need to take serious precautions, people lose consciousness incredibly fast, don’t even feel it coming,” I say to Benton, and I put my hand on his arm. “We need to make sure all the CO2 has been vented outside.”

I know,” he says, and I see it in his eyes.

He’s afraid Douglas Burke is in that room.

She came here,” Benton says.

He must have been here and then went to Fayth House to see his mother, to leave birthday flowers for her. His mother must be a resident there, and he must have spotted me pulling in.”

Everybody back!” The cop takes his stance and swings the battering ram behind him.

A secretary told Doug that Channing Lott was gone for the day and directed her to his chief of operations. To this place. It was around five-thirty,” Benton says.

The iron ram slams the door.

Not long after I saw her,” I reply. “When she was following me and I left you the messages.”

Why are you holding a scalpel?” Benton asks, and I realize he doesn’t know.

He hasn’t a clue what I’ve been through.

I got a ride here I didn’t ask for,” I reply, as the battering ram swings back again and slams again, and wood splinters.

Deadbolt locks break loose of the wooden frame, and the metal door swings in, and the blasting noise is louder. Frozen carbon-dioxide vapor condenses the humidity in the air, and we are enveloped by a cold white cloud.





two nights later

LUCY HAS BEEN HIDING MORE THAN ONE DECEPTION AT her country home, and I remind Marino that a dog is a problem if it’s not taken care of rather constantly.

I’ve seen my share of neglected pets.” I sauté crushed garlic in olive oil. “Having a dog is like having a child.” I wish I’d started the sauce earlier.

But there’s been no earlier time to do anything civilized, the last two days a relentless ordeal that didn’t include cooking or sleeping or eating decent food. I keep wondering how it would have turned out if Lucy hadn’t insisted on installing GPS trackers on all CFC vehicles, if she hadn’t followed my SUV. A part of me is haunted by what didn’t play out.

Dogs require a lot of attention,” I’m saying to Marino, as I stir fresh basil and oregano into the sauce. “Which is why Bryce and Ethan have always had cats.”

You’re kidding me, right? We know why the hell the Odd Couple has cats. Gay guys are into cats.”

That’s a terrible stereotype, not to mention ridiculous.” A few pinches of brown sugar would be nice, and some red pepper flakes.

You know, that same guy who played Felix Unger also played Quincy. You ever stop to think about that and how long ago it was?”

Jack Klugman played Quincy. Not Tony Randall,” I reply. “A dog is a lot of work, Marino.”

I don’t know. It’s just weird, Doc. Where time goes. I remember watching that show before I knew enough to realize how damn stupid it was, like that episode when cancer mutated and started killing everyone? And the guy who had his arm reattached and then his good one went bad after that? Jesus, at least thirty years ago, and I was still boxing, just getting started with NYPD, had never even met a real Quincy, and here I am working with you. People think getting old happens to everybody but them. Then you hit fifty and go What the f*ck.”

I remove a damp cloth from a ceramic bowl and check on the dough, and Marino is sitting on the floor. His big legs are stretched out as he leans against the wall, at home inside my kitchen with a rangy-looking German shepherd puppy, a rescue Lucy airlifted out of a pig farm she and Janet shut down the other day. All paws, with huge brown eyes and cocked-up ears, black and tan, maybe four months old, curled up in Marino’s lap, my greyhound, Sock, on the rug next to them.

Cambridge was all set up to get a K-nine, and then they didn’t approve the budget.” Marino reaches for his beer, and he’s different with the puppy.

Marino’s gentle. Even his voice is different.

The problem’s paying overtime for whoever has the dog, but in my case I can do it for free and it’s not a union problem or whatever because I don’t work for them. You want to grow up to be a cadaver dog?” he says to his puppy.

What an ambition.” I divide the dough into three balls.

Then he could come to work with me. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Come to my big fancy building every day,” he says to the puppy in a voice that can’t be described as anything but silly, and it licks his hand. “That would be okay, right, Doc? I’ll train him, take him to scenes, teach him to alert on all kinds of things. That would be really cool, don’t you think?”

I don’t care anymore. Sleeping over in an AeroBed, a dog in the office, none of it seems important anymore. I’ve played it out so many times and can’t answer the most fundamental question. Would I have cut him badly enough to save myself? It’s not that I wouldn’t have tried, because I have no doubt I was going to slash at his face, but a scalpel blade is very short and narrow, and can break off from the handle.

I had one slim chance that it turns out I didn’t need, but I can’t stop thinking about it because it’s just one more reminder that the tools of my profession don’t save anyone. Even as I’m thinking this I know it’s not entirely true, and I need to snap out of this damn mood.

I’ve been making myself crazy trying to come up with a name,” Marino says. “Maybe Quincy. How about I call you Quincy?” he says to the puppy, and I hate it when I’m negative.

It certainly can be argued that if I help stop a killer I’m saving a life, maybe more than one life, that what I do morning, noon, and night prevents more violence, and Al Galbraith wasn’t finished. Benton says he was just getting started, that his elderly mother, Mary Galbraith, who has been a resident at Fayth House for years, suffered a stroke about ten months ago and has never recovered cognitive functions. That seems to have been the trigger, as much as it is possible to explain what can’t be explained.

The youngest child of a philanthropic Pennsylvania family that dabbles in farms and horses and wineries, a graduate of Yale, never married, and he hated his mother that much. She was a scholar, a member of the Society of Civil War Historians, and a consulting archivist for the Girl Scouts, and he couldn’t kill her enough.

What kind of wine?” Lucy walks in with several bottles.

Janet already has helped herself to a glass, and I wipe my hands on my apron and inspect labels.

Nope.” I return to the dough I’m working, flouring it, pressing it, gently stretching it into a circle. “Those pinots from Oregon.” I move the dough, using my knuckles so I don’t poke holes in it. “That lovely case you gave me for my birthday, the Domaine Drouhin down in the basement.”

Janet says she’ll get it, and I move my knuckles apart and rotate the dough, stretching it for the first pizza, this one mushrooms, extra sauce, extra cheese, extra onion, double smoked bacon, and pickled jalapeños. Marino’s pizza. I ask Lucy to get the fresh grated Parmigiano-Reggiano and whole-milk mozzarella out of refrigerator two, and I suggest Marino take both dogs out in the backyard.

You see?” I say to Lucy when he’s gone. “I have to ask him. This is what worries me. It should occur to him on his own that it’s time to take his puppy out.”

It’s going to be fine, Aunt Kay. He loves that dog.”

Loving something’s not enough. You have to take care of it.” I start on the next pizza crust.

Maybe that’s what he’s finally going to learn. How to take care of something and how to take care of himself; maybe it’s time he does.” Lucy sets bowls of cheese on the counter. “Maybe he needs a reason to go to the trouble. Maybe you have to want something so badly that you’re finally willing to be less selfish.”

I’m glad you feel that way.” I toss the crust and place it in an oiled, floured pan, and I know Lucy is talking about herself and what’s going on in her life. “I just don’t understand why you felt you couldn’t tell me. Maybe you could get the onions and mushrooms out of refrigerator one; we’re going to need to sauté them and drain them. To get all the water out.”

I was afraid to jinx it,” she says. “I needed to see if it could work, and most times it doesn’t work if you try to go back to someone you used to be with.” She finds a cutting board and a knife. “I know you feel you should be told absolutely everything, but I have to be alone in my life, to feel what I feel by myself sometimes.”

I certainly don’t feel I should be told everything.” I place a third crust in a pan. “If I really felt that way, I wouldn’t have much of a marriage.”

I haven’t seen Benton since yesterday, when he was with me at my office. I took care of Douglas Burke because I didn’t think anyone else should, and Benton didn’t look on directly, but he was in the autopsy room the entire time. Mainly he wanted to know if she struggled, if she made any attempt at all to defend herself. Burke was armed with a nine-millimeter pistol, and Benton didn’t understand what could have happened, why she didn’t fight.

All she did was shoot the damn door and shoot it badly, he said repeatedly.

Based on the dents and holes in the door and door frame, she was aiming for the lock.

Why the hell didn’t she shoot him? Benton must have asked that a dozen times, and I’ve continued to explain what seems obvious to everyone else.

Burke was so hung up on Channing Lott, she was so convicted in her own beliefs, that she didn’t know who stood before her. She didn’t realize who the killer was until he led her into that windowless room, what Al Galbraith had turned into a death chamber, an empty storage area with walk-in deadbolted freezers and a port in a brick wall fixed with a nozzle. The dry-ice blaster was on the other side of that wall, and that’s where Galbraith would turn it on, a heavy-duty aggressive machine with a hopper that could hold enough dry-ice pellets to blast frozen CO2 for hours.

Galbraith had adjusted the settings as low as they would go, the purpose of this particular piece of equipment not for removing mold or sludge or grease or old paint or varnish or corrosion. He didn’t use this monster machine to blast clean the inside of wine barrels but to kill human beings, running at a low pressure of eighty pounds per square inch, consuming sixty pounds of dry ice pellets per hour, the carbon dioxide level slowly rising as the temperature in the room dropped, and the noise of compressed air would have been terrible.

Douglas Burke didn’t struggle with him, didn’t have a chance. I suspect he tricked her into stepping inside that room and then shut the door and locked it. The best she could do was try to shoot her way out, emptying her entire clip, but she couldn’t get the door open, and she likely had very little time to try.

It’s really not possible for me to know how long she was alive, but by the time we got to her she was beginning to freeze-dry, was partially frozen inside that frigid airless chamber where one chair had been set in the middle of the reddish fiber–covered concrete floor. Where he sat Peggy Stanton so he could verbally abuse her, is Benton’s guess. Where he sat Mildred Lott, whom he didn’t know socially and who treated him like a Lilliputian, Galbraith told the FBI.

• • •

It is almost ten p.m. when Benton pulls in, and Sock gets up and lazily trots to the side door and Quincy bounds after him, and I’m glad they’re friends. The moon is distant and small over rooftops behind our Cambridge home, and the French stained-glass window is lit up over the staircase landings, its wildlife scenes bright like jewels from the backyard where Benton and I decide to sit. The low stone wall around the magnolia tree is cold, and I realize it is winter.

Not even Halloween yet and it’s cold enough to snow,” I say to Benton in the dark, and he has his arm around me, pulling me close.

Try not to be so pessimistic,” I say to him after hearing about his day, about how badly he thinks the case will go. “I’ve been telling myself the same thing all night. Don’t lecture Marino. Don’t lecture Lucy. Don’t be so damn hard on myself and assume nothing makes a difference.”

I wish he’d just go ahead and commit suicide in jail.” Benton sips straight Scotch. “There. I said it. Save the government a trial. But pieces of shit like that don’t kill themselves. Same damn dog and pony show all over again. I can’t believe Donoghue’s firm is going to represent him, probably will be Judge Conry again, and you’ll get dragged through it again.”

I won’t be called by her this time.” It won’t be Jill Donoghue subpoenaing me. “This is the prosecution’s case. It’s theirs to win.”

Dan Steward is a moron.”

I remind him the evidence is compelling. Galbraith killed all of them, leaving partial prints on boxes of trash bags, on a malt liquor bottle and a pouch of cat treats, and the wooden fibers he tracked from what the police now call the blasting house were also on Peggy Stanton’s body and inside her car, where a fingerprint on the rearview mirror is his, and prints were found on checks he forged to pay her bills.

The same wine-stained American oak fibers were inside an old lobster boat Galbraith kept in a marina, I remind Benton, trying to encourage him. Police found Peggy Stanton’s clothing and Mildred Lott’s nightgown in a drawer at his waterfront house on Cohasset Harbor, where he stored his once formidable mother’s personal belongings. Even a moron can’t lose a case like this, I say to Benton.

I’m confident we’re going to have DNA,” I assure him. “Paint samples from the lobster boat match the trace of paint on the bamboo pole, the same residue on the barnacle I removed from the leatherback. And that places his boat in the area where Peggy Stanton’s body was recovered, where he ran into the turtle, plus he had her cell phone and checks. He had Emma Shubert’s cell phone, and a range extender in his warehouse so he could log on to Logan’s wireless. And then there’s the rather glaring detail of Mildred Lott’s body.”

I mention that it might be difficult for even Jill Donoghue to explain why Mildred Lott’s body was found frozen rock-solid inside one of Al Galbraith’s freezers.

Donoghue will say Channing Lott had something to do with it or is to blame, and what’s maddening about it is he can’t be tried again.” Benton’s voice is glum, his chin resting on top of my head.

Well, that would be a good argument.” I feel his heartbeat through my jacket, and I reach up to kiss him. “And I’m glad you’re not the lawyer in this case. Let’s go eat.”

• • •

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credits

As always, I’m grateful to those who so generously share their expertise during a Scarpetta journey. All of you help make the magic.

Thank you, Dr. Marcella Fierro, for all things forensic-pathological, and as always I’m grateful for Dr. Nicholas Petraco, the guru of trace evidence.

I’m indebted to Stephen Braga for guiding me through legal dilemmas and courtroom scenes, and to Cambridge Police Detective Danny Marshall for letting me tag along with him.

Hugs to Dan and Donna Aykroyd for daring Staci and me to join them on a dinosaur dig in northwest Canada’s bone beds, where I found a seventy-million-year-old tooth and the idea for this novel.

What a blast that the U.S. Coast Guard (San Diego) and the Boston Fire Department’s marine unit shared their go-fast boats with me.

I’ll always owe you, Connie Merigo, the New England Aquarium’s rescue director, for teaching me all about sea turtles, and allowing me to get close enough to touch and smell a rare leatherback.

And words of thanks aren’t enough for my partner, Dr. Staci Gruber, my muse for technology, for everything.