Patricia Cornwell - The Bone Bed

“Evidence of atherosclerosis, calcification in some blood vessels.” Anne isn’t amused.

“You can tell hardening of the arteries from a CT scan?” Nothing Burke does is going to lighten the mood. “Seems like that’s a good thing to find out before I eat another Whopper.”

“Eat what you want; you don’t look like you’ve got a worry,” Luke says to her, and maybe he’s flirting. “They’ve found atherosclerosis in Egyptian mummies four thousand years old, so it’s not just a by-product of modern life. In fact, it’s probably part of our genetic makeup to be predisposed to it,” he adds, because he just doesn’t get it, or maybe he doesn’t care that Marino is in trouble.

“I suppose we have to consider she might have died from a heart attack or stroke, in other words, natural causes, and someone decided to conceal the body, then get rid of it.” Burke’s eyes are steady on mine.

“At this stage, it’s wise to consider everything, to keep an open mind,” I answer.

“Nothing else radio-opaque except dental restorations,” Anne informs me. “And she has plenty of those. Crowns, implants, an expensive mouth.”

“Ned’s coming in to compare charts,” Luke lets us know. “In fact, that’s probably him now.”

Car lights are white and glaring on a closed-circuit security screen, a small blue hatchback, Ned Adams’s ancient Honda parking in the lot.

“Then we must already have premortem x-rays for comparison.” I direct this to Benton.

“Records we got from a dentist in Florida,” he says.

“Who do we think this lady is?” I ask him.

“It’s looking like she’s a forty-nine-year-old Cambridge resident named Peggy Lynn Stanton. She usually spends her summers at Lake Michigan, Kay,” my FBI husband replies, as if we are amicable colleagues. “Much of her time is spent away from Massachusetts. It appears it was her habit to be here usually in the winter and fall only.”

“It seems strange to spend winters here. That’s usually when people leave,” I remark.

“Sometimes she’d go to Florida,” Burke says. “There’s a lot to find out, obviously.”

“Meaning friends, possibly her family, weren’t always sure where she was?” I ask dubiously. “What about telephone calls, e-mail . . . ?”

“We sent agents to check,” Burke says. “Well, why don’t you pick up here?” She directs this to the woman I don’t know. “Valerie Hahn’s with our cyber squad.”

“And for the record, everybody calls me Val.” She smiles at me, and she shouldn’t bother.

I don’t feel friendly and am consumed by worry. What has Marino done?

“The bottom line is it certainly appears she never got to her cottage on the lake,” Valerie Hahn says. “It’s totally abandoned. No luggage. Nothing in the fridge. It’s looking like she vanished into thin air around the first of May, possibly earlier, and Dr. Zenner mentioned that could be consistent with the condition of the body?”

“I’ll know better when we autopsy her.” It rankles me that Luke has told them anything.

“I don’t know if you might have heard her mentioned?” Valerie Hahn says to me.

I open the door leading out into the corridor, where Ned Adams is headed toward us, carrying his old black leather medical bag.

“Why would I have heard her mentioned?” I ask bluntly.

“I’m just wondering if the name Pretty Please means anything to you, or perhaps anyone on your staff?” Hahn says.

“Hello, Ned.” I hold open the door for him. “She’s in the scanner. Help yourself.”

“I can do it in there. Sure.” He pushes back the hood of a long yellow raincoat that is dripping water on the floor. “Her films are up to date. Lots of crowns, implants, root canals, including a panoramic x-ray that’s good of the sinuses. You got those?”

“I can put them up on the screens even as we speak.” Anne starts typing. “You want a printout, too?”

“An old-fashioned guy like me still likes paper. She has lots of features, an embarrassment of riches, shouldn’t take long. Are we hot?” He pauses at the door leading into the scanning room as if it’s a military operations area that might be dangerous.

“The scanner’s offline,” I tell him. “You know how to slide out the table?”

“I do.” He takes off his coat.

“Presumably because her initials are PLS,” Douglas Burke explains. “One might suspect that’s where please comes from.”

“You’re on Twitter, aren’t you, Kay?” Valerie Hahn acts as if we’re friends.

“Barely.” I’m beginning to understand, or I think I do. “I don’t use it to socialize or communicate.”

“Well, I know you never tweeted Peggy Lynn Stanton, whose handle on Twitter is Pretty Please, ” Hahn says.

“I don’t tweet anyone.”

Marino, what have you done?

“It’s easy enough to see that you two weren’t tweeting each other.” Hahn is quite sure of herself. “One doesn’t even need admin privileges to see that.”

“I don’t think we need to get into this level of detail right now.” Benton watches Ned Adams through glass.

“I think we do.” I look at him until he looks at me.

“Suffice it to say that at least something useful came from all the television coverage.” I can read Benton’s reluctance in the flatness of his eyes. “Our office in Boston got phone calls, Cambridge got phone calls, Chicago and Florida got calls, at least a dozen people certain the dead woman is Peggy Stanton, whom these people said they haven’t seen or heard from, apparently, since at least May, when she was supposed to be on her way to her Lake Michigan cottage or possibly Palm Beach. People here assumed she was in Illinois and people up there assumed she was still here. Some people assumed she was in Florida.”

“People? As in friends?” It is all I can do to mask how much I don’t like this.

“Various volunteer groups and churches.” Benton knows exactly what I’m feeling, but it doesn’t matter.

This is how we do our jobs. This is how we live.

“Apparently she was very involved in eldercare. Here, in Chicago, in Florida,” he says.

“She has family and they haven’t wondered where she is after all these months?” I think about what Marino said to me in the car this morning when we were on our way to the Coast Guard base.

“Her husband and two kids died thirteen years ago when their private plane crashed.” Benton reports the information objectively, and he can sound so cold.

But that’s not who he is.

“An investment broker with a hefty life insurance policy,” he reports. “Left her fairly well off, not that she was poor to begin with.”

“None of her vendors have complained that she’s not paying her bills? No one noticed she wasn’t answering e-mails or her phone?” I don’t say what I’m thinking.

How simple it would be to hoodwink Marino in cyberspace, where he doesn’t know how to navigate and his insecurity makes him vulnerable.

“She’s been paying her bills all this time,” Benton replies. “She was tweeting as recently as two weeks ago. She’s made calls from her cell phone as recently as the day before yesterday—”

“Not the person in there. She certainly didn’t.” Luke interrupts Benton while watching Ned Adams through the window.

“Someone’s been doing it.” Benton finishes what he was saying, but he doesn’t say it to Luke.

Inside the scanner room, Ned Adams opens his black leather bag. He puts his glasses on. He squints up at a video screen displaying dental x-rays.

“She’s been dead quite a lot longer than two days or two weeks,” Luke volunteers, when he really should shut up. “She certainly hasn’t been tweeting or writing checks or making phone calls for quite some time. Months, at least, I’d say. Would you agree, Dr. Scarpetta?”