The Bone Bed

seven

THE WIND GUSTS SHARPLY OUT OF THE NORTHEAST, pushing water in swells, and where the harbor is shallow it is green, and farther out a dusky blue. From my seat to the left of the pilot coxswain, who is chiseled and young, with ink-black hair, I watch seagulls lift and dive around the pier while Marino continues to be ridiculous.

He is combative and loud, as if it makes any sense to declare war on a five-point harness because its sub-strap and large rotary buckle of necessity must lodge snugly between one’s legs. The life vest he has on makes him look bigger than his more than six-foot frame, and he seems to fill half the cabin as he resists the assistance of a boatswain I know only as Kletty, having met this crew for the first time but a few moments ago.

I can do it myself,” Marino says rudely, and it isn’t true that he can do it himself.

He’s been fussing with the straps, trying to defeat the buckle as if it is a Chinese puzzle, making a lot of impatient clicking and snapping noises as he turns the rotary and attempts to force metal links into the wrong slots, and I can’t help but wonder what Bryce said, exactly, when he called the Coast Guard a little while ago.

What persuasion of his resulted in the vessel we’re on?

Typically a 900-horsepower 33-foot Defender with shock-mitigating seats that restrain us like fighter pilots isn’t necessary for what we do. One doesn’t need maneuverability or high rates of speed when there are no arrests or rescues, and then I recall snippets of what my chief of staff was describing over the phone, painting a morbid scenario about putrid human remains and hosing off the deck and double pouching. Better to be on a bigger boat with an enclosed cabin so we can rocket back to shore with our antisocial cargo, I suppose.

It’s tricky,” says the boatswain named Kletty, as he finishes strapping Marino into the seat behind me.

Don’t need it.”

You do, sir.”

Sure as hell don’t.”

Sorry, but we can’t go anywhere if everyone’s not strapped in.”

Then the boatswain checks my harness, which is fastened correctly, the sub-strap and rotary buckle wedged where they belong.

Looks like you’ve done this before,” he says to me, and I sense he might be flirting, or maybe he simply is relieved that I’m not going to give him an argument about Homeland Security protocols.

I’m all set,” I reply, and he takes a seat next to the redheaded machinist mate, whose name I think is Sullivan, the three members of the crew friendly enough and quite compelling in navy blue fatigues and caps and blaze-orange life vests.

When so many young men I come across are very nice to look at, it reminds me I’m getting old or acting as if I’m getting old or feeling like a de facto mother, and I try to resist staring at the pilot, who looks like an Armani model. He notices me looking and flashes a smile as if we are on a leisurely cruise that involves nothing awful or dead.

Sector one-one-niner-oh-seven under way. GAR score one-two,” he radios the watch standard command center that the Green-Amber-Red risk assessment for this mission is at the moment low.

Visibility is good, the water relatively calm, the three-member team on board well qualified to transport a forensic radiologic pathologist and her grumpy lead investigator to a location amid islands and hazardous shoals in the south channel, where several hours ago a dead body and an almost extinct species of sea turtle were discovered intertwined in tangles of rope weighted down possibly by a conch pot.

Coming up!”

A push of the throttle, and within minutes we are going thirty-six knots and climbing. The high-performance boat slices through the water, blue lights strobing, frothy white wake curling on either side of the bow, where a weapons post is lonely for its M240. Long guns and machine guns weren’t part of the checklist, as interdictions and violent confrontations aren’t anticipated. Other than the .40-caliber Sigs the crew members have strapped to their sides, there are no firearms on board that I’m aware of, unless Marino is packing a pistol in an ankle holster.

I glance at the cuffs of his khaki cargo pants, at his big booted feet, and see no hint of a weapon as he continues to complain, staring down at the hockey puck–looking buckle wedged snugly in his crotch.

Leave it alone.” I raise my voice above the loud rumble of outboard engines, turned in my seat so I can talk to him.

But why does this thing have to be right here?” He places his hand protectively between the buckle and his “privates,” as he calls them.

The straps have to be routed so they restrain the body’s hard points.” I sound like a stuffy scientist making a sophomoric pun and am conscious of the handsome pilot, who was introduced as Giorgio Labella, and I can’t forget a name when it belongs to someone who looks like that. I feel his large, dark eyes glancing at me as I talk. I feel them on the back of my neck as if a warm tongue has touched me there.

Technically, I’ve never cheated on my husband, Benton Wesley, to whom I’ve been devoted for the better part of twenty years. It doesn’t count that I cheated with him when he was married to someone else, because that’s different from cheating on him. It doesn’t count that I was briefly involved with an ATF agent assigned to Interpol in France when Benton was in a federal witness protection program and presumed dead.

Any involvements before Benton or after I believed he was no longer alive are irrelevant, and I rarely think of those individuals, including a few I will never make confessions about, as the consequences would be unnecessarily damaging to all involved. I behave myself, but it doesn’t mean I’m not interested. Being faithful to my commitments doesn’t mean thoughts don’t cross my mind or that I’m foolish enough to believe I’m not capable. As a somewhat isolated professional woman in a mostly male world, I’ve never lacked opportunities to cheat, even now that I’m not in my thirties anymore and could be someone’s de facto mother.

To the young men I encounter in the line of duty I’m ripe fruit and cheese served on a formidable platter, I suppose. A cluster of red grapes and figs with a soft Taleggio on a plate featuring a distinguished coat of arms, perhaps, or a trophy, as Benton suggested. I am a chief. I am a director. I have a special reservist rank of colonel in the Air Force and am important to the Pentagon. Power is the forbidden appetizer the Labellas want to sample, if I’m honest with myself, and Benton says I’m not. A trophy, I think. A not-so-young trophy, attractive to attractive people because of who and what I am.

It isn’t really about the way I look or my personality, although I’m diplomatic, even charming when needed, and not as shopworn as I probably deserve to be, blond and strong-featured, my Italian bones a sturdy scaffolding that continues to hold me up through decades of hard times and near misses. I don’t deserve to be slender and toned, and I often joke that a life spent exposed to formalin in windowless rooms and walk-in coolers has preserved me well.

I really am taking this thing off.” Marino continues staring down at the heavy hunk of plastic as if it is a bomb or a giant leech.

The pelvic bone, the clavicles, the sternum. Hard points of the body that can sustain several thousand pounds of force.” I sound as if I’m delivering an anatomy lecture, and I sense the crewmen listening. “How many seat belt injuries have you seen? Thousands,” I reply above thundering outboard engines as I check my e-mail again. “Especially when the lap belt ends up around the abdomen instead of low around the hips, and in a collision what happens? All that force is directed at soft tissue and internal organs. That’s why we wear harnesses like this.”

What are we going to run into out here? A f*cking whale?” Marino exclaims.

I certainly hope not.”

We speed through a light chop, past long fingers of wharfs and piers that date back to Paul Revere as a British Air 777 roars low overhead, inbound for Logan to the east, its runways surrounded by water and barely above sea level. Off our starboard side Boston’s financial district sparkles against the bright blue sky, and behind us, rising above the Navy Yard in Charlestown, the Bunker Hill memorial looks like a stony version of the Washington Monument.

Let’s just see,” I say to Marino. “We’re what? Maybe a quarter of a mile from the terminals?”

Not even.” He sits tightly strapped in his chair, staring through water-splashed Plexiglas.

The airport is sprawled over thousands of acres that jut out into the water, the air traffic control tower’s windowed floors supported by two concrete columns that remind me of stilts. Two intersecting runways extend far out into the harbor, their stony embankments remarkably close, not even a hundred feet to our left, I estimate.

Depends on where the LAN is located, of course,” I add, as I go into settings on my iPhone and turn on Wi-Fi. “But I know for sure I’ve been stuck in planes on the runway before and accessed Logan’s wireless. Nothing out here, though,” I observe over the noise of engines and the boat bottom thudding the water. “Logan’s signal has dropped off. So if the person sent the e-mail from a boat, for example, I’m going to suspect it was practically right up on the rocks, right up next to the runway.”

Maybe someone sent it from a boat that has a router,” Marino suggests.

Lucy is absolutely sure it was sent from an iPhone. But I suppose it could have been synced with a router, making it easier to access an unsecured network,” I consider, as we pass the curved glass building of the federal courthouse and its public park at Fan Pier.

I check my e-mail again. Nothing, and I write another note to Dan Steward, letting him know I’m en route to a death scene and will have to take care of what I suspect will be a complicated autopsy when I return to the office. Please confirm whether I need to show up at two p.m. as planned, and I continue to hope my presence won’t be required after all. I hope it rather desperately.

It’s absolutely absurd, my being subpoenaed by Channing Lott’s attorney, nothing more than harassment and an attempt to intimidate and humiliate, and of course I don’t say that to Steward. I’ll never again say much at all in e-mails or any written communication, and I dread what I imagine will be tomorrow’s headline:

MEDICAL EXAMINER SAYS LOTT’S WIFE TURNED INTO SOAP

Last March on a late Sunday night, Mildred Lott vanished from their oceanfront mansion in Gloucester, some thirty miles north of here. Footage from infrared security cameras shows her opening a door and emerging from the house into the backyard at almost ten o’clock at night. It was very dark out, and she was in a bathrobe and slippers, walking toward the seawall while apparently talking to someone, I’ve been told. The security recording shows that she did not return to the house, and the next morning when her driver appeared to take her to an appointment, she did not answer the door or her phone. Walking around back, he discovered a door wide open and that the alarm system wasn’t set.

Deleted e-mails recovered by the police revealed a cyber-train that led directly to Channing Lott, whose wife isn’t my case. Her body hasn’t been found, and the sole reason for my being summoned to court today is an electronic communication, one I didn’t think twice about last spring, when Dan Steward wanted to know if a body were dumped off the coast of Gloucester that time of year, how long would it take to completely decompose and what would happen to the bones.

I replied that for a while the coldness of the water would actually preserve the body, although fish and other marine life would do some damage. I said it could take as long as a year for saponification, for the body to form adipocere, which is caused by the anaerobic bacterial hydrolysis of fat in tissue. In other words, I made the mistake of saying in my e-mail that a body underwater for a long period of time rather much turns into soap, and it is this comment that Channing Lott’s lawyer wants to confront me with in court today.

If I end up having to appear at two, it probably is a good idea if you’re with me. I agree,” I say to Marino, because I already know what’s going to happen—that I won’t get out of it. “Maybe Bryce should be with us. I worry there will be a lot of media.”

What an idiot,” Marino says. “With all his money and he stiffs the hit man?”

That’s not why I’ve been subpoenaed or my point,” I reply, somewhat impatiently.

Some dirtbag he hires off the Internet, Craigslist, whatever, and he wonders why he got caught,” Marino says.

The point I’m making is the abuse of the judicial system,” I reply. “A perverting of fairness.”

We are past the seaport and the massive stone fortification Fort Independence, which protected Boston from the British in the War of 1812, swerving away from Deer Island, where waste-treatment plant sludge digesters look like eggs. The gray sandy shoreline of Hull curves around a harbor packed with small boats, and a graceful white windmill rises from the hills. I let Marino know he should be careful that the same fate doesn’t befall him that has befallen me.

It’s a sobering reminder of what can happen,” I say to him.

The defense wants me in court because Channing Lott wants me there, for no reason other than to force me into something, which Lott legally has the right to do. Any report generated by any forensic expert no longer speaks for itself unless both sides agree that the forensic scientist, the medical examiner, the scene investigator doesn’t need to appear in person. While I understand the logic of the Supreme Court’s decision that a document can’t be cross-examined, only a human being can, what has occurred in the wake of the ruling is that overworked, underpaid experts are being abused and run ragged.

Any time we generate a document that might end up in court, one side or the other can demand we take the witness stand, even if the written words are nothing more than a voice-recognition text message or a handwritten note on a Post-it. As a result, some key members of my staff have begun ducking cases. If they dodge a crime scene or an autopsy or don’t offer their expert opinion or even a glib remark, there’s no chance they’ll be subpoenaed, which is yet another reason why I don’t like the idea that Marino is allowing the death investigator on call to go home so he can sleep over at the CFC.

If one isn’t careful,” I’m saying to him, “one might find he never has time to do his work anymore. I’m being dragged to court today because of an e-mail I sent to Steward when he asked my opinion and nothing more. My opinion and an admittedly careless comment in an e-mail and it’s all discoverable, every keystroke. And you wonder why I don’t involve myself personally in Twitter and things like that. Anything can and will be used against you.”

That’s all I intend to say to him while we’re on a Coast Guard boat with a crew who can hear every word. When the timing is right, Marino and I will have a conversation about ornamenting and whatever else is going on in his life that has resulted in his turning the CFC’s investigative division into a Motel 6 because he can’t or won’t go home.

Coming up!” our pilot, Labella, lets us know as he monitors the depth sounder, and other vessels hail over the radio.

The water opens into a fan-shaped expanse that is bordered by the north and south channels and their many islands, and we pass green channel markers on our right, the boat rising and falling, its thrust pushing me back in my chair.

It’s going to be a cluster f*ck,” Marino says, when the fireboat comes into view, its emergency lights flashing red, a news helicopter hovering overhead. “Who the hell alerted the media?”

Scanners,” says Labella, without turning around in his chair. “Reporters monitor our freqs out here on the water just like they do on land.”

He announces he’s bringing back the speed as we approach the James S. Damrell, a seventy-foot FireStorm with a flat-planed red-and-white hull and raked forward windshields, and bow- and roof-mounted fire guns. Surrounding it are a shark-gray police Zodiac, fishing and pleasure boats, and a tall ship with red sails furled, the cops and the curious, or maybe it is both, and I don’t look forward to what I must do, especially when there is an audience. I think of the indignity of being dumped like garbage or lost at sea and being gawked at.

A liquefied natural-gas tanker painted parakeet green moves at a glacier’s pace, giving the flashing fireboat a wide berth, and Labella steers us closer and cuts the engines to idle as I recognize the marine biologist from the photograph Marino showed me. Pamela Quick and half a dozen marine animal rescuers crowd the lower deck and the dive platform, attending to what looks like a primitive cross between a reptile and a bird, some evolutionary manifestation from the dinosaur age, when life as we know it began to exist on earth.

The leatherback is at least nine, possibly ten, feet in length, his throat puffing out unhappily, his powerful front flippers pinned to his black leathery sides with a yellow harness that crisscrosses his carapace like a straitjacket. Lashed to the back of the platform and rocking on the water is an inflated float bag with a wooden ramp on top that I assume was used to pull the monstrous creature on board.

This is insane.” Marino stares in disbelief. “Holy f*cking shit!” he exclaims, as I get out of my seat.