Patricia Cornwell - The Bone Bed

“You mean that he went back in her house.”

“I mean that he went in there at all. Even if it was only once.”

“Interesting you’d say that, because I just got the alarm log. Other than the firefighters prying open the basement door with the hooligan?” He means a Halligan tool. “Last time the alarm system was disarmed was April twenty-ninth, a Sunday, at eleven-fifty p.m. Someone was inside the house for approximately one hour and then reset the alarm. Obviously this person left and never went back. There’s been no alarm activity since until tonight, like I said.”

“Not even false alarms?”

“All she’s got is door contacts. No motion sensors or glass breaks, none of the usual shit that goes off.”

“And before April twenty-ninth?”

“That previous Friday, the twenty-seventh,” he says. “A couple ins and outs, and then someone left around six p.m., reset the alarm, and it wasn’t disarmed again until Sunday the twenty-ninth at the time I just told you. At almost midnight.”

“Possibly on that Friday night it was she who went out. She went somewhere, possibly in her car. And the person who came back late on Sunday was someone else.”

“I’m with you so far.”

“Did you happen to notice if her garbage cans had anything in them?” I ask.

“Totally empty,” he says.

“Trash collection’s on Mondays,” I reply. “I’m wondering if this person emptied her refrigerator of perishables, took out the garbage, and rolled her super-can curbside.”

“Then rolled it back under the side porch?”

“Yes. Possibly when this same person cleaned out her mailbox and suspended her newspaper delivery.”

“Jesus. Who does that? Not some stranger.”

“She might not have been a stranger to him. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a stranger to her. I’m not saying their paths didn’t cross, but that doesn’t mean she was personal with him or even aware of him.” I think of everything Benton said about who we’re looking for. “What I’d like to do is get trace and latent prints started on her car first thing in the morning. In other words, a full-court press. Not just checking mileage and the GPS but checking everything. Can you come in?”

“With bells on.”

“And if you happen upon paperwork such as vet records or bills? Maybe something will have the cat’s name on it?”

“She could have one of those chips.”

“I’ll have her scanned at the vet’s office,” I reply. “Maybe Bryce can take her in tomorrow. We’ll see if there’s an ID number we can check with the National Pet Registry.”

I get off the phone, turning right on White Street, and feel terrible that I don’t know what to call her.

“I’m really sorry, but I can’t just call you ‘the cat,’” I say to her, and she purrs loudly. “If you could talk you could tell me who put you out of the house, what bad person did that. Not just a person who isn’t nice but an evil one, and I suspect you were scared of him because you sensed what he really is. A man nobody thinks twice about. But he’s cruel. And you picked up on it, didn’t you, when he let himself inside your house? You wouldn’t come up to him until he tricked you with those treats I saw on the counter?”

I stroke her flat-eared head, and she rubs her face against my palm.

“Or maybe you ran out the door. Maybe you fled. I’ll buy you a bag of treats. The same thing, salmon Greenies, because I know that’s what your mother bought for you, lots and lots of bags of them in a cupboard. And grain-free turkey and salmon, which I also saw in the kitchen, plenty of it. She made sure you were well fed, had lots of healthy things to eat, didn’t she? You don’t seem to have fleas, but I’ll give you a bath and get you cleaned up, so you’re probably going to be angry with me.”

It’s almost midnight as I pull into the Shaw’s supermarket parking lot, illuminated with tall light standards and bordered by bare trees moving in a wind that has died down considerably.

“I guess I could call you Shaw, since this is our first outing together.” I park near the brick columned entrance. “I apologize I don’t know who you are exactly, and I don’t want you to worry, but I’m going to have to leave you in the car for a few minutes because I don’t have anything at home for a cat. Only things for a dog, his very boring fish diet and sweet-potato treats. An old greyhound named Sock who is very shy and probably will be afraid of you.”

I leave her wrapped in the towel in the driver’s seat, shut the door, and am pointing the remote to lock it when headlights blind me as another car turns in. For an instant I can’t see, and then a window rolls down and Sil Machado is grinning at me.

“Hey, what’s doing, Doc?”

“Cat shopping.” I walk over to his Crown Vic. “You following me?”

“We sure it’s really her cat?” He shifts the car into park and props an arm on the door frame. “And yeah. I’m following you. Somebody’s got to.”

“Logic would tell you it’s her cat. But I don’t know it for a fact. She certainly seems lost and homeless.” I look around at the almost empty lot, at someone rolling a shopping cart at the far end of it. “Are you coming inside?”

“Don’t need anything at the store,” he replies. “Just making sure you get home okay.”

It seems a strange thing for him to say.

“I know you’re used to riding around all over the place at all hours. But I’m just making sure,” he repeats.

“Do you know something I don’t?” I notice bags of evidence in the dark backseat, including those I collected.

“Someone who’s familiar with Cambridge, right?”

“Someone who’s familiar with her house, her neighborhood. Someone who made himself familiar, anyway.” I step back to look through the driver’s window of my SUV, making sure the cat’s okay.

She’s sitting up on the towel.

“Getting her mail out of the box, right? Maybe emptying her garbage and rolling out her can?” Machado looks at me, and he’s as serious and unyielding as granite. “So I’m thinking this guy’s way too comfortable around here. Knows when to get mail out of her box, probably at least once a week? Knows when garbage collection is. I hate what happened back there. I mean, Burke was out of bounds.”

“I don’t know how much mail she got.” I’m not going to discuss what he’s just brought up.

“Me and Marino ride Harleys together. Which is how we got in tight.” Machado stares past me. “He drops by with pizza, to have coffee, sometimes we meet up at the gym, a real good guy and respects the hell out of you. I had no idea. I mean, I don’t know what to say except I know what he feels about you. I know he’d take a bullet.”

“I’m assuming this person was getting her mail once a week or a couple times a month at an hour when he’s not likely to be seen. The obvious point would be he didn’t want to raise suspicions and have people looking for her while he still had her body, storing it wherever he did for months.” I’m not going to talk about Marino with him. “Do you have that keychain with you?”

“Okay, sure.” He reaches over the back of the seat and finds the brown paper bag.

He opens it and pulls out a smaller bag that has the car key inside it, and he hands it out the window to me.

“Never had a case where someone’s this brazen. Well, it’s not normal, Doc.”

“When is murder normal?” I hold the transparent bag up and illuminate it with the light from my phone.

“So you think it’s some sicko who lives in a sick fantasy world, but he looks like the average man on the street.”

“What do you think?” The car key is infrared, with a battery, the compass attached to it by a quick-key-release chain with a split ring at either end.