Patricia Cornwell - The Bone Bed

“Is he on his back, his side, facedown?” I open a cabinet, looking for three-percent hydrogen peroxide.

“On his back and left hip, kind of twisted in a heap,” she replies.

I go to the computer and take a look. Howard Roth’s body is turned to one side on the basement floor at the bottom on the steps. He stares straight up, his knees drawn, his arms bent by his sides, and blood is coagulated and drying under the back of his neck, spreading to a stain that disappears under his shoulders. Once he landed in this position, I’m fairly sure he didn’t move.

“It bothers me that it seems the sole reason Channing Lott became a suspect is an e-mail exchange between him and whoever he allegedly was attempting to hire,” Lucy says. “You’re aware of it, I assume?”

“Not specifically.” I return to the cabinet and find jars of sodium acetate and 5-sulfosalicylic acid.

“I’ll pull it up from online news,” she says, as she does it. “So this past March fourth, a Sunday? An e-mail was sent to Channing Lott’s personal account from a user he later claimed he didn’t recognize but assumed it was someone from one of his shipping offices. He said in direct testimony that he can’t possibly know the names of everyone who works for him around the world.”

Lucy reads what’s quoted in the story.

I realize it’s inappropriate for me to contact you directly through e-mail, but I must have verification of the partnership and the subsequent exchange before I proceed with the solution.

“And what did Channing Lott reply?” I dissolve the sulfosalicylic acid into hydrogen peroxide.

“He wrote, ‘Are we still committed to an award of one hundred thousand dollars?’”

“Certainly sounds incriminating.” I check the reagent Leuco Crystal Violet, LCV, making sure it hasn’t turned yellow, that it’s white and fresh.

“He claims he assumed the e-mail exchange was about a monetary prize his shipping company offers,” she reports. “That he often partners with other marine transport companies in rewarding scientists for coming up with viable solutions for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

I pour in the LCV, a cationic triarylmethane dye, and mix with a magnetic stirrer.

“The amount of the award was in fact one hundred thousand dollars,” Lucy says.

“Sounds like an argument Jill Donoghue would come up with.” I transfer some of the solution into a spray bottle.

“Except the Mildred Vivian Cipriano Award has existed for more than a decade,” Lucy says. “So it wasn’t just trumped up for his defense to explain away the e-mails. And since whoever initiated them has never been arrested or even identified, I conclude the e-mail sent to Lott wasn’t traceable. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?”

“If you could go into that cabinet and get the D-Seventy.” I tell her which lens I want. “We’re going to try infrared to see if there are any bloody impressions we can enhance that aren’t going to show up any other way on black cotton.”

We begin taking photographs using different filters and shutter speeds and distances. First we try without chemical enhancement, and on the front and back of the T-shirt and on the plaid boxer shorts are indistinct areas where a bloody residue was transferred to the fabric by something coming in contact with it. Then I spray the LCV and it reacts to the hemoglobin in blood, and I get discernible shapes, startling ones.

Footwear images, the outsole, a heel, a toe, glow a vivid violet, the bloody shapes overlaying one another as someone repeatedly stomped and kicked Howard Roth’s chest, his sides, his abdomen, his groin, while he was on his back, probably while he was already down on the basement floor. He bled from a gash on his head, and he bled from his nose and mouth, frothy blood from shattered ribs puncturing lungs, and I try to imagine it.

A man drunk and barely dressed, and I don’t believe he was in bed when his killer showed up. Most people don’t wear socks to bed, especially in warm weather, and I go through the scene and autopsy photographs again, and I’m not satisfied.

I call Sil Machado.

“Free as a bird” are the first words out of his mouth. “And Donoghue’s giving you all the credit.”

“Wonderful.”

“She says you reminded the jury, and rightly so, that it can’t be proven that Mildred Lott is dead, much less that her husband did it.”

“Where are you now?”

“What do you need?”

I ask him to meet me at Howard Roth’s house as I pull off protective clothing in the anteroom, and the door leading into the corridor opens. Benton is here.

“Give me about twenty minutes,” I tell Machado. “If you get there first it would be helpful if you wait outside.” I meet Benton’s eyes. “It appears Howard Roth had a visitor right before he died. The check you found in the toolbox? Have you submitted it?”

“Latents has it,” Machado says. “And by the way, when they fumed the car they got a print from the rearview mirror. And it isn’t Peggy Stanton’s.”

thirty-two

BENTON DRIVES MY SUV WEST ALONG THE CHARLES, past the Art Deco former headquarters of Polaroid and the patinated copper-roofed DeWolfe Boathouse. It’s noon, and patchy ice has melted, sunlight sparkling on water and bright on the old Shell sign. We head toward Central Square while I return Ernie’s call.

“Marine paint,” he says right off. “No big surprise, since the turtle obviously was in the water when he bumped into something or something bumped into him. An antifouling paint loaded with copper to retard the growth of barnacles, mussels, and so on. Also zinc, which would be consistent with primer.”

“And consistent with the color,” I reply. “That yellowish-green brings to mind a zinc-based primer.”

“Microscopically, you got more than one color,” he says. “In fact, you got three.”

We cross Massachusetts Avenue, City Hall up ahead, Romanesque, with a bell tower and stone walls trimmed in granite, and Ernie explains that the traces of paint transferred to the barnacle and also to the broken end of the bamboo pole came from the bottom of a boat. Possibly the prop or an anchor or anchor chain that at one time, he says, probably a number of years ago, was painted black.

“Often whatever is used to paint the bottom of a boat is also used on other areas that remain submerged when the boat is moored,” he adds.

“A quick-and-dirty way of doing it,” I reply, as Benton turns at the YMCA. “Use the same paint on everything.”

“Quick-and-dirty is what a lot of people do, and then there are those who don’t give a damn and are really sloppy and irresponsible,” Ernie says. “Whoever painted the boat you’re looking for falls into that category.”

It doesn’t fit with what I think of him, a killer tidy and meticulous, who plots and plans in his malignant fantasyland.

“The zinc-based primer went on top of the old paint, which wasn’t sanded off; someone couldn’t be bothered.” Ernie continues to describe what he found on a swipe of color almost invisible to the unaided eye.

A boat this person uses for his evil but not for his leisure, not for his pleasure.

“And over that a deep red coating with copper or cuprous oxide, which is usually used on wood,” he says. “I have a feeling the boat you’re looking for has a lot of chipped, peeled, or damaged red topcoat, some areas of exposed primer. In other words, something not well maintained at all.”

An old boat in ill repair that probably isn’t registered in his name or docked where he lives or even near there.

“If it were a prop, wouldn’t you have expected more damage to the turtle?” I ask.

“If the prop was turning, yes. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe the person cut the engine while he did what he did.”