Patricia Cornwell: The Bone Bed

“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 fucking 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.