Patricia Cornwell - The Bone Bed

“Her house is on Sixth Street,” Benton says to me. “Very close to Cambridge P.D., which just makes this all the more curious. No one’s been in it. The alarm is set, the car in the garage, police driving past it every day, and no one the wiser.”

“A time capsule,” Douglas Burke adds. “The fire department’s at the ready to breach the back door as soon as we get there.”

“I suggest you might want to go pick up those pizzas I asked you to order,” I say to Benton in a way that communicates exactly what I want him to know.

This is my office. The CFC doesn’t answer to the FBI. I will handle this case as I see fit.

“I’m posting her first. Her house can wait,” I add, in the same tone. “It’s waited half a year. It can wait two hours longer, but she can’t.”

“We were hoping Dr. Zenner could take care of the autopsy and you’d come with us and take a look,” Burke suggests.

“Whatever you need me to do.” Luke gets up from his chair as Anne walks into the scanner room and hands printouts to Ned Adams.

“What I need is for you to give us a chance to do our job here,” I reply, as the x-ray room door opens, and now Lucy is here, looking at me from the corridor. “Searching a potential crime scene is much more meaningful if we know how the victim died and what we might be looking for.”

“Could I see you for a minute?” Lucy doesn’t step inside.

“If you’ll excuse me. I think we’re done for now,” I say to the FBI.

“I noticed your car in the bay.” I walk with Lucy back toward the receiving area, stopping where no one can overhear us. “I’m wondering why.”

“And I’m wondering a lot of things.” My niece is dressed the way she was when I saw her early this morning, all in black, and it’s not like her to show up when the FBI is in the area. “I’m wondering why Marino and Machado are in the break room with the door shut. I can hear them arguing, that’s how loud Marino is. And I’m wondering why a Sikorsky S-Seventy-six belonging to Channing Lott might have filmed you recovering that body from the water today?”

“His helicopter? That’s stunning.” I hardly know what to say.

With all that’s gone on since, I haven’t given the large white helicopter another thought since I e-mailed the tail number to Lucy while I was in the car with Marino, heading to court.

“That’s really rather unbelievable,” I add, as my thoughts dart through possibilities of what I should do.

Dan Steward needs to know before closing arguments. If Channing Lott somehow is behind his helicopter filming what we just watched in court, and I don’t know how he couldn’t be, then the jury should know before it begins to deliberate. But it may be too late for that.

“The Certificate of Airworthiness is registered in Delaware to his shipping company,” Lucy informs me.

I can imagine how it would appear if I call Steward with this information and he’s forced to say in open court or even to the judge who the source is. The information would be damaging to Jill Donoghue.

Stay out of it.

“His fleet of some hundred and fifty car carriers, container ships, the M V Cipriano Lines,” my niece is telling me.

“I’m sorry.” I try to focus on what she’s saying.

“What the chopper’s registered to,” she says. “A shipping company named after his missing wife, Mildred Vivian Cipriano. Her name before they got married.”

twenty-one

AROUND THE CFC, FORENSIC DENTIST NED ADAMS IS known as the tooth whisperer because of what the dead confide in him. Age, economic status, hygiene, and if that’s not enough to tattle about, teeth snitch on diet, drink, drugs, and if the person were pregnant or had acne or an eating disorder.

In his late sixties, slightly stooped, with bad knees and a deeply wrinkled face that has smiled more than frowned, Ned can determine minutiae from a single tooth that the deceased’s closest friends and family likely never knew or imagined. Peggy Lynn Stanton, he confirms, as we wheel her body along the corridor after weighing and measuring it in the receiving area, was victimized in life by a very bad dentist, who, as Ned puts it, cost her or someone “an arm and a leg.”

“A Dr. Pulling; now, how’s that for a name? Only he sure didn’t live up to it in her case, as I’m about to tell you.” Ned stiffly accompanies Luke and me toward the decomp cooler, his raincoat draped over his arm, a buoyant air about him, because his mission is successfully accomplished and he’s in no hurry to go home to an empty house. “Some cosmetic dentist in Palm Beach, Florida, who didn’t comply with the standard of care; not saying it was intentional. Maybe just incompetence.”

“Yeah, right,” Luke says sarcastically. “Where’s the loot?”

“Tooth number eight, a maxillary central incisor with extensive internal root resorption coupled with a buccal fistula,” Ned says. “You can’t miss this big internal radiolucency in the middle of the pulp canal in her pre- and postmortem radiographs.”

“This is under a crown?” I pull up the handle of the cooler door.

“Exactly. Trauma resulting in an infection and ongoing inflammation that went unchecked, and he slapped a porcelain crown on top of it anyway. I’m guessing this joker cost her about forty-K, all told, and a lot of pain and inconvenience. Her bite’s messed up, I’m pretty sure, but can’t prove it because I can’t exactly ask her if she suffered chronic headaches. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had TMJ, though. When you go to search her house, look for a night guard.”

As if that’s the most important thing I might find.

“The time frame for when the infection started?” I guide the gurney through frigid air stale with death, pushing past a silent sad audience of black-pouched mounds on steel trays, many of the patients stored here still unidentified.

“It’s hard to pinpoint, but based on her charts?” Ned’s breath fogs out. “I’d say it’s related to a root canal two and a half years ago, which was followed by the porcelain crown this past March.”

“So she was in Palm Beach as recently as March,” I assume, as we exit through the rear cooler door that opens onto the decomp room.

“She must have been.” Ned follows us in. “And it’s impossible for me to believe that by then the resorption hadn’t already progressed to involve the periodontal ligament space and the tooth. In other words, that damn tooth should have been extracted and not restored.”

“Yet one more crook in the world,” Luke says.

“Well, had she lived, she inevitably would have faced an extraction followed by an implant and another crown.” Ned sets his black bag on a countertop and drapes his coat over a chair as if he plans to stay for a while. “Lots of root canals—eight, to be exact—likely from trauma caused by drilling down healthy teeth for crowns that I doubt she needed. Her rear molars, for example? Why bother putting porcelain on teeth no one’s going to see? Use gold. Believe it or not, it’s cheaper.”

“Money, money, money.” Luke hands me a mask and gloves, his blue eyes calmly on mine, as if he can explain everything that’s happened, as if I should have no reason to be concerned about him.

“That and this same dentist was also doing facial injections,” Ned lets us know, as Luke and I put on shoe covers and gowns. “The newest trend that I have serious qualms about? Dentists injecting patients with Perlane, Restylane, Juvéderm, and other facial fillers, and also Botox. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but I don’t think dentists should be plumping up cheeks and smoothing out frown lines.”

We slide the body from the gurney to an autopsy table, and she looks tragically small and wizened on cold stainless steel. Turning on an examination light, I move it along its overhead track as Luke labels specimen containers on a cart, and my feelings about him are mixed and confusing. They’re ambivalent and scary, and I try not to think about the outrageous accusations Marino made in the car this morning. I don’t want to admit they might have merit.