Patricia Cornwell - The Bone Bed

It’s almost three p.m., and we’re going to be late for a meeting Benton scheduled in my TelePresence conference room, and I’m not happy that Douglas Burke has been included. I thought Benton made it perfectly clear that they couldn’t work together anymore.

“He stages his crimes in a premeditated and precise way, he’s obsessed with games that include framing people, and then is careless about fingerprints and blood?” I worry again that something might have gone on with Benton and Burke.

“He has reason to believe such evidence isn’t incriminating to him,” he says, as we go back to the CFC the way we came, following the river, and the water is dusky, the sky a pale blue haze. “For one thing, he probably assumed it wouldn’t be found. He didn’t think you’d look. That’s the important part, Kay. He didn’t assume you’d bother with anything you’ve bothered with. He doesn’t know you, not in the least,” he says that again.

Douglas Burke will be waiting in my conference room, and I’m not sure what I’ll do when I see her.

“There’s ridge detail all over the bottle,” I reply. “I didn’t even need dusting powder or an ALS to see that there’s enough minutiae for an identification.”

“But we don’t know whose identification.” Benton glances at his phone in his lap, at whatever’s just landed. “Could be Roth’s prints on there. Most likely he bought the malt liquor and drank it.”

“The important point is the killer didn’t even bother wiping off the bottle, which is really careless,” I repeat. “The smartest thing would have been to take it with him and toss it somewhere it would never be found.”

“Disposing of the weapon in a bag full of bottles and cans that Roth collected shows the killer’s complete disregard for his victim, his utter indifference.” Benton glances down at his phone again. “Roth was nothing to him, nothing more than an inconvenience, and the killer assumes everybody would feel that way because he doesn’t know how to feel any other way. He can’t project values onto you or anyone that he doesn’t have.”

“Onto me specifically?”

“Yes, onto you, Kay. He doesn’t know you.” Benton drums that in. “He can’t imagine what you’ll do or how you feel because he’s incapable of empathy. Therefore, he reads people wrong.”

“We’ll see about the print on Peggy Stanton’s rearview mirror, if it matches anything on the bottle.” I think out loud as I worry, and I don’t want to worry.

I want to trust Benton. I want to believe every word he’s told me.

“Maybe he left a print on her mirror but no hit in AFIS.” Benton scrolls through messages. “He’s not in the system. He’s someone no one would suspect. He’s never been arrested and has no reason for his prints to be in a database. He’s quite comfortable he’ll never be a suspect, and you’ve caused a problem he’s not expected. The question is whether he knows it by now.”

“I wish you wouldn’t look at that thing when you drive.” I take his phone from him. “If you do it when I’m with you, what do you do when I’m not?”

“Nobody you need to worry about, Kay.” He holds out his hand. “I don’t do anything when you’re not with me that you need to worry about.”

“I thought you talked to her.” I return his phone.

“She’s not leaving Marino alone. Probably the biggest reason to have this meeting.”

“But she’ll lay off him when she hears what we know,” I assume, because Burke certainly should.

“It’s ridiculous,” he says. “Marino’s prints, like yours, like mine, are on file for exclusionary purposes, and it’s not his fingerprint on Peggy Stanton’s rearview mirror. And he sure as hell didn’t murder Howard Roth. Marino was in Tampa when Roth was killed. The meeting will put an end to it.”

“He probably still thinks we believe it was an accident.” I’m not thinking about Marino but the person Burke should be looking for.

I’m thinking about the killer.

“Unless he’s been following us,” I add. “In that case, he might know what we do. If he’s cruising around, watching us.”

“I doubt it.”

“Why?”

“He’s not nervous,” Benton says. “This person is confident and never imagines he’s making mistakes. He never imagined you’d spray everything with chemicals, that you’d find blood he didn’t bother to clean up.”

“He couldn’t have cleaned it up,” I reply. “Not all of it.”

It wasn’t apparent to the unaided eye, a medium-velocity impact spatter I associate with blunt force. Varying sizes of elongated drops were on the left side of the recliner, on the brown vinyl armrest, and on the dark brown paneled wall left of where I believe Howard Roth’s head was when he was struck hard enough to lacerate his scalp and fracture his skull.

The bloodstain pattern that glowed violet for me told the heartless story of him asleep or passed out drunk in front of the TV when a murderer walked in a door that apparently was never locked. Roth was struck once in the back of the head with a malt liquor bottle that the killer placed inside a trash bag he closed with a twist tie.

Bloody streaks and swipes on dirty stained dark carpet and bloody drag marks soaked into the pile led from the living room to the basement door, and then blood was plainly visible where one would expect it to be if he were an accidental death. Drips and smears were on the six concrete steps leading to the basement, his unconscious body pushed down the stairs and then kicked and stomped where it landed. The killer made sure Roth wouldn’t survive and assumed no one would entertain the possibility he was a homicide, that it would never enter our minds.

“He did make some effort to disguise what he’s done,” Benton points out, as we pass the boathouse, the old Polaroid building again. “He could have just showed up late at night and shot him, stabbed him, strangled him, but that would have been obvious. He got some of it right but not the rest of it, because he’s unable to anticipate what normal people do.”

“He can’t imagine any of us caring.”

“That’s right. Someone empty, hollow. He’s probably seen him around here.”

Benton suspects the killer has noticed Roth in Cambridge, has been aware of him for months, observing the handyman wandering about looking for work and digging through trash cans and recycle bins, sometimes pushing a grocery cart. This killer is aware of everyone when he’s stalking his next victim, Benton says. He prowls, cruises, researches, observing patterns and calculating. He does dry runs, feeding his cruel fantasies.

But that doesn’t mean he knew who Howard Roth was by name. The killer forged a hundred-dollar check that he likely sent in the mail as he continued to pay Peggy Stanton’s bills long after she was dead. But that doesn’t mean he had a clue that the Howard Roth whose check he wrote was the homeless-looking man he saw rooting through the trash in Cambridge.

“What I’m sure of is he killed Roth when he did for a reason,” Benton says. “This was an expedient homicide devoid of emotion.”

“Stomping and kicking him seems rather emotional.”

“It wasn’t personal,” Benton replies. “He felt nothing.”

“It could be construed as angry. In most stomping cases, there’s rage,” I reply.

“He felt he needed to get it done. Like killing a bug. I’m wondering if he’d been to her house recently, if Roth had.” Benton’s looking down at his phone again. “Maybe wanting his money, and it was bad timing.”

“If the killer happened to be stealing Peggy Stanton’s mail when Roth appeared, that would be bad timing, couldn’t be worse timing.” My building is in sight. “But I wouldn’t expect him to do that during daylight.”