Patricia Cornwell - The Bone Bed

Benton was up there watching, and during certain moments it couldn’t have been more obvious. I didn’t move away. I didn’t try to stop it, because I couldn’t, because I wanted it. I desired him in the midst of what was dead and horrible, when the urgency to feel alive can override what is logical.

“His rages, his insults; he was completely uncooperative,” Benton is saying, and I’m barely listening.

Luke asked me and I thought about it, wondered where and when as I entertained fleeting plans about how to get away with it. I said no and felt yes, what Benton accused me of in Vienna true.

“I had to leave the room at one point so I didn’t lose it with him.” What I hear Benton saying is he left the conference room upstairs.

He’s making sure I know what he did, checking on us from behind the darkened glass of a teaching lab.

“All because he had to start a relationship with a complete stranger in cyberspace, for Christ’s sake,” Benton says.

“Welcome to modern life,” I reply bleakly. “People do it every day.”

“No one I know.”

“Marino’s been as voraciously lonely and as empty as a black hole ever since Doris left, and that was almost longer ago than they were married. He’s had nothing but meaningless encounters ever since, most of them with women who hurt him, take advantage, are a horror show.”

“He’s certainly had his turn at being the horror show, the one doing the hurting,” Benton says, and I don’t argue with him.

I can’t possibly.

“No one I work with meets people on the goddamn Internet.” He makes that point again.

“That’s rather difficult for me to believe.”

“No one I work with is that stupid,” he says. “The Internet’s the new mafia. It’s what the FBI infiltrates undercover and spies on. We don’t go there for our fucking personal lives.”

“Well, Marino can be that stupid,” I reply. “He’s that lonely and misses his wife and misses being a cop and fears getting old and has no insight about any of it.”

I drive slowly along 6th Street, the Cambridge Police Department’s headquarters shrouded by rain, Art Deco lights glowing blue in the fog.

“What I don’t understand is how someone might think anything’s accomplished by making it appear he was tweeting a woman who clearly couldn’t have been alive while it was going on,” I then say.

“How long she’s been dead isn’t going to be clear to everyone.”

“You saw her body. What’s left of it.”

“It all depends on the interpretation.” He makes his point in a way that’s disturbing, as if it might be one that’s been made before.

“The ‘interpretation’?” I repeat rather indignantly. “It’s clear she’s been dead for months.”

“Clear to me, but I’m not most people,” Benton says. “It depends on what TV shows they watch. They hear the word mummified and expect she was wrapped in bindings and found in a pyramid.”

I can barely make out the charter school and biotech buildings we pass, the lighting in most parts of Cambridge notoriously bad.

“It doesn’t help matters that he was at Logan around the same time you got the anonymous e-mail relating to Emma Shubert’s disappearance.” He gets to that, and nothing would surprise me.

“He’s never been to Alberta, Canada, and wouldn’t know the first thing about anonymizing software or proxy servers, Benton.”

“As far as anyone knows.”

“What possible motivation could he have, even if he were able to?” I ask.

“I’m not the one who thinks he might.”

“Others think he could have something to do with Emma Shubert.” I want him to spell it out.

“Or have something to do with what was e-mailed to you. It’s all part of the same discussion,” he says, and it’s ridiculous, and I tell him that, but I’ve seen ridiculous things before, the wildest of goose chases.

I know better than to dismiss any notion investigators might get into their heads.

“I’m worried it’s someone who knows him, Kay.”

“These days anybody can know anybody, Benton.”

“A paleontologist has vanished and is presumed dead, and you’re sent a photo of a severed ear,” he says. “Mildred Lott has vanished, her husband on trial for her murder, and then his helicopter films you while you’re getting Peggy Stanton’s body out of the bay just hours before you’re supposed to testify. I’m worried whoever’s doing this—”

“Whoever? As in one person?”

“Connections. There are too many. I don’t believe it’s coincidental.”

“You think it’s one person doing all of it?” I ask.

“If you want to get away with something, do it by yourself. And I worry this person knows Marino, knows you. Maybe knows all of us.”

“It doesn’t have to be someone who knows him or any of us,” I disagree. “If you search Peter Rocco Marino on Twitter you can find him. You can find so much about any of us on the Internet it’s rather terrifying.”

“Why would this person look for him on Twitter to begin with? Unless there’s a personal reason to get him into serious trouble?”

“Lucy set him up on Twitter in early July. When he moved into his new house,” I recall. “When did he and Pretty Please start tweeting each other?”

“He claims she tweeted him first. He says this was late August, close to Labor Day, maybe the weekend before. That she said she was, quote, ‘a fan . ’”

“A fan of Jeff Bridges’ or of Marino’s?”

“Exactly. Because he’s such an idiot,” Benton says. “Using the avatar of a character from some bowling movie, calling himself The Dude. From which Marino instantly concluded that she must be a bowling enthusiast, meaning they have something in common.”

I slow to a stop in Peggy Lynn Stanton’s neighborhood, the headlights shining through rain, illuminating the dark street and the cars lining both sides of it.

“I’ll go through all the tweets, his e-mails, his phone records, whatever it takes,” Benton says. “Because I’m the one who will get him out of this mess he’s made, isn’t that the irony?”

Houses are old but not historic or expensive for Cambridge, single-family and occupied, charming and pristinely kept, and so close together it would be difficult for a person to walk between them.

“He assumed she bowls, or she said she did?” I ask.

Yards are small or nonexistent, parking coveted. Neighbors would be keenly aware of vehicles that don’t belong here.

“I don’t know in detail what was tweeted back and forth between them, but he seems to have the impression she’s an avid bowler. Or was.”

I try to imagine forcing a woman from her house, and I can’t see it. I can’t imagine someone screaming or causing any sort of disturbance that wouldn’t be witnessed. We sit in silence in the drumming rain, distant lightning like a flash going off as thunder rolls. I don’t believe Benton thinks Peggy Lynn Stanton was killed in her house or abducted from it, and I ask him that.

“The fact is we don’t know,” he says. “Doug has her own opinion, but it’s not necessarily mine.”

“Tell me yours.”

“I’ll tell you who.”

“Do you have a suspect in mind?”

“I know who he is, in his late twenties at least but probably older.” Benton scans where we are on the dark rainy street. “Intelligent, accomplished, blends in but is isolated emotionally. Doesn’t get close. Those who think they know him don’t.”

“‘Him’?”

“Yes.” Benton looks at cars; he looks at houses. “Familiar with boating. Likely has a boat or access to one.”

I think about Marino’s obsession with the CFC getting a boat, and I wonder who else he’s said this to.