Patricia Cornwell - The Bone Bed

“One hasn’t been here for weeks; that’s obvious.”

Weeks, I think, and I don’t like where this is headed already. Burke is going to question any conclusion I make about facts she decides are debatable, and Benton isn’t going to intervene.

“Do we know if she has a housekeeper?” I inquire. “Or if, perhaps, she might have cleaned her house herself?”

“We don’t know yet. The yard man hasn’t been around, you probably noticed,” she says to me, and my regard for her hasn’t changed over the several years I’ve known her rather distantly.

A former prosecutor, reasonably bright and aggressive, Special Agent Douglas Burke has always been appropriately attentive to the wife of the man she works with most closely and in secret. I like her and I don’t. I’ve never been sure what she honestly thinks of me or feels about my husband, her emotions and interests covert, and right now what I’m starting to sense is strong.

“People tend to notice things like that in Cambridge.” Benton wipes down his coat, his shoes with the towel. “If the yard, the maintenance of the property are neglected long enough, inevitably someone calls the city and complains.”

“We’re getting that information, too.” Burke hands us coveralls. “We have found out she stopped the newspaper delivery May third.”

“Or somebody did.” Benton neatly places his coat and shoes on the plastic-covered safe area. “You can do it online. You abduct someone and don’t want it discovered anytime soon that the person is missing, go online and suspend the newspaper delivery. Make sure you place occasional calls on their cell phone to directory assistance, wherever you’ll get a recording. Or call people from the contact list at weird hours and hang up or don’t leave a message.”

“It was her habit to suspend delivery every spring or early summer,” Burke informs us. “Specifically, The Boston Globe, whenever she was leaving Cambridge, and it doesn’t seem she spent summers here after her family was killed in the plane crash. I can’t imagine going through something like that. I can’t even think about it. Losing everybody at once.”

“It would have reshaped her. She wouldn’t have been the same person after that, for better or worse.” Benton continues assessing who Peggy Stanton may have become.

“If she was at her Lake Michigan cottage, she’d have the Chicago Tribune delivered, but that was never started up this summer.” Burke gives us gloves, and I notice her hands are shaking, probably from the Sudafed, or maybe she’s excited by the hunt.

You want to hunt me, go ahead.

“As I’ve indicated, all signs so far point to her never getting to Illinois.” She stares at me and I stare back.

“The rug underneath?” I indicate what’s under the plastic as I walk across it in booties.

“Nothing’s been done.” She knows what I’m asking.

Any areas of flooring near entrances are important. If a perpetrator was in and out of the house, most likely this person used a door. I would hope Burke and Machado wouldn’t walk on the entrance rug, dripping rainwater and tracking dirt on it. I would hope they wouldn’t cover it with plastic without checking for evidence first. For hairs, fibers, soil, botanical debris, for anything.

“You’ve done nothing at all?” I step onto the uncovered floor, noticing the iron umbrella stand in the corner to the right of the door.

In raised letters on its bottom tray is A la Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes , the name of the Paris zoo. Wedged underneath the stand, between the back of it and the wall, is a twisted dark blue plastic ring.

“We’ve been here all of an hour. The plan is for us to do the walk-through with you before anything’s disturbed,” Burke explains, as if I’m the one who requested this tour, which really isn’t a tour.

It’s a hunt.

“Then Sil will collect evidence if there is any,” she says. “He’ll lift prints if we find them. But I don’t think anyone of interest was in here. I don’t think this is a crime scene. Hard to know at this point who’s been in and out and how recently, and we’ll certainly get those answers, but it’s doubtful they’ll be relevant.”

It’s obvious she’s convinced of that by now, and probably was convinced of it before she got here.

“There’s no sign of a struggle, of violence, but you’re the expert,” she says to me the way a defense attorney might. “Nothing seems to be missing in terms of possible robbery. Some rather expensive jewelry in her bedroom, in a dresser drawer, nothing looks rifled through or disturbed. Her car’s locked up in the garage.”

“We’ll want to look,” Benton says. “We’ll want to check gauges, check how much gas, check the GPS, if she’s got one.”

“Sil’s called for a truck,” Burke says.

“Good, because the car shouldn’t be examined here,” I answer. “It should go to the labs, to the evidence bay.”

She asked me here as an expert, and I will be one. I could walk back out the door, but I won’t.

“The battery’s probably dead,” Benton comments.

“Shit.” Burke dabs her nose with a tissue. “I’m going to claw my eyes out with this goddamn dust.”

“What about the car key?” he asks.

“On that table there in the bowl, probably where she usually left it.”

“A pocketbook, a wallet?” His sharply handsome face is framed in white polypropylene.

“No sign of either,” Burke says. “It’s looking like she went somewhere and then whatever happened happened. Of course, we don’t know if she’s a homicide. We don’t know for a fact she met up with foul play, do we, Kay?”

She isn’t asking. She’s testing.

“How do you suppose she managed to vanish if she didn’t drive,” I ask pointedly. “She physically left this house at some point. Yet her car key is here? Her car is here?”

“The thing is”—Burke watches me crouch near the umbrella stand, looking at the twisted plastic ring without touching it—“we don’t know for a fact that she vanished from Cambridge or even from Massachusetts.”

“Except Massachusetts is where her body was found.” I get back up.

“She could have been abducted in Florida, in Illinois, who knows where.” She poses it as a hypothetical, and I don’t buy that’s what she thinks.

“You’re right. We don’t have all the facts,” I reply. “But her body ended up here. That’s beyond dispute.”

“Even so, we just don’t know where she vanished from.” If nothing else, Burke is reminding me why the FBI is involved, reminding me of the Bureau’s jurisdiction when crimes cross state lines, reminding me why it’s justified for me to feel intruded upon and confronted. “She might have left town of her own volition, been in and out, ended up in the area. Maybe she was with someone and died of natural causes and the priority became to dispose of the body for some reason.”

“Nothing indicates she died of natural causes,” I assert.

“And nothing indicates otherwise,” she pushes back.

“Someone likely held her hostage and kept her body in cold storage for months. And then tethered it in such a way that it would be pulled apart when we tried to recover her from the bay. I’d say that’s an indication she didn’t die of natural causes,” I remark.

“But you don’t know what killed her, as I understand it?” She lets that same question hang in the air.

“At this time I don’t.”

“You don’t have a guess.”

“I don’t guess.”

“Then you don’t know.”

“I don’t know for a fact at this point.”

“Isn’t that unusual, when the body is in relatively good shape?” Burke hasn’t taken her eyes off me, and it occurs to me she might think I’m lying.