Patricia Cornwell - The Bone Bed

“You texted Lucy you would call her as soon as you got in the car,” she says. “And you didn’t.”

“And that was enough for her to start tracking me?”

“She does it more than you think. Tracks you, me, pretty much everyone. And she could see you were at Fayth House and then were heading toward Boston instead of toward home. Plus, you’d left some rather urgent messages for Benton.”

She explains to me that they were very close to Fayth House anyway, taking Marino back to his Cambridge house, and were talking about the significance of Mildred Lott going out in the dark.

“She thought she heard Jasmine in the backyard,” Janet says. “She was calling out the name of her dog.”

I’m aware that Lucy has been working with British and German researchers on computer-based lip-reading technology, and Janet says the software is now good enough to use when people are turned as much as a hundred and sixty degrees sideways. In other words, you can barely see their mouths moving but the computer does.

“And she was turned away from the camera, looking in the direction of where she heard whatever she heard,” Janet says. “The security camera caught her from the side only, and it sort of does look, a little bit, at least, like she’s saying her husband’s name.”

I’m searching for Benton, wondering if he’s here. He must have alerted agents, the police, and if so, I know what that means. He found out what I feared is true. Douglas Burke came here to do battle with Channing Lott, whose shipping headquarters looms in the distance beyond the dry-docked hospital ship, a huge white prewar building with hundreds of windows, most of them dark at this hour.

“I could see someone like a prosecutor thinking that or wanting to think it,” Janet is saying. “Not Channing but Jasmine . She was calling her dog and looked really happy, thrilled and excited but frantic, and now we know why.”

My feet aren’t numb anymore, and now they’re itching.

“Not exactly,” I reply. “Why did she think her dog was out there?”

“Either he had the dog with him or more likely he had a recording,” she says. “If he stole the dog days earlier and recorded it barking.”

I continue to rub my feet as Janet walks over to the SUV and opens the tailgate.

“Try one of the big orange cases,” I call out to her, and police are everywhere, and Al Galbraith is in cuffs and is being placed in the back of an FBI sedan.

I look around at Boston cops and agents and Machado, and then I see Benton with uniformed officers who are breaching the entrance of the warehouse. What I don’t see is any sign of Douglas Burke. Three loud thuds of a lightweight battering ram and the door gives and is opened, and there are lights on inside a cavernous open space where I can see rows of shiny steel machines on wheels and coils of hoses and hundreds of wooden barrels stacked against a far wall.

Benton and the others approach a shut metal door, and I can make out the reddish tint to the floor and hear what sounds like steam blasting. I remember Burke’s accusatory comments about Crystal Carbon2, a green way to do industrial cleaning. Solid carbon-dioxide blasting, she said. Compressed air propelling dry-ice pellets at supersonic speeds, and carbon dioxide is one of the simplest and most common asphyxiants known.

Colorless, odorless, it is one and a half times heavier than air, so it flows downslope and settles, displacing oxygen. In a confined space at a concentration of ten percent a person loses consciousness in less than a minute and will asphyxiate, and Al Galbraith was right.

Nothing will show up on autopsy, not a damn thing, unless the person is burned. At more than minus one hundred degrees Fahrenheit dry ice causes frostbite, is so cold it may as well be hot, and I think of the strange hard brown areas on Peggy Stanton’s arm and feet and her broken nails and ripped pantyhose.

He locked her in that room behind that shut metal door and turned on a machine, and she knew she was going to die if she couldn’t turn it off. She got close to the white fog blasting out of the nozzle, reached for it, kicked at it, and it burned her. I imagine her darting about, banging on the door, clawing at the nylon hose that weren’t hers, maybe wrapping her hands in shreds of stockings to protect her skin as she tried again, and the concentration of CO 2rose.

Janet returns with boot covers, and I pull them on, frustrated that I don’t have my phone. I get out of the car and awkwardly trot, my feet still not quite belonging to me, it seems. I head toward the warehouse, where all the trucks are parked, and the sound of compressed air blasting is coming from behind the closed metal door, and it must be locked because the police have the battering ram ready.

Red woody fibers are like a fine coating of soil or dirt on wire shelves arranged with accessories. Hoses, nozzles, insulated gloves, and the fine debris coats stainless-steel surfaces of blasting machines and scores of hard case insulated coolers and containers, what the dry-ice pellets likely are shipped in.

“You’re going to need to take serious precautions, people lose consciousness incredibly fast, don’t even feel it coming,” I say to Benton, and I put my hand on his arm. “We need to make sure all the CO 2has been vented outside.”

“I know,” he says, and I see it in his eyes.

He’s afraid Douglas Burke is in that room.

“She came here,” Benton says.

“He must have been here and then went to Fayth House to see his mother, to leave birthday flowers for her. His mother must be a resident there, and he must have spotted me pulling in.”

“Everybody back!” The cop takes his stance and swings the battering ram behind him.

“A secretary told Doug that Channing Lott was gone for the day and directed her to his chief of operations. To this place. It was around five-thirty,” Benton says.

The iron ram slams the door.

“Not long after I saw her,” I reply. “When she was following me and I left you the messages.”

“Why are you holding a scalpel?” Benton asks, and I realize he doesn’t know.

He hasn’t a clue what I’ve been through.

“I got a ride here I didn’t ask for,” I reply, as the battering ram swings back again and slams again, and wood splinters.

Deadbolt locks break loose of the wooden frame, and the metal door swings in, and the blasting noise is louder. Frozen carbon-dioxide vapor condenses the humidity in the air, and we are enveloped by a cold white cloud.

two nights later

LUCY HAS BEEN HIDING MORE THAN ONE DECEPTION AT her country home, and I remind Marino that a dog is a problem if it’s not taken care of rather constantly.

“I’ve seen my share of neglected pets.” I sauté crushed garlic in olive oil. “Having a dog is like having a child.” I wish I’d started the sauce earlier.

But there’s been no earlier time to do anything civilized, the last two days a relentless ordeal that didn’t include cooking or sleeping or eating decent food. I keep wondering how it would have turned out if Lucy hadn’t insisted on installing GPS trackers on all CFC vehicles, if she hadn’t followed my SUV. A part of me is haunted by what didn’t play out.

“Dogs require a lot of attention,” I’m saying to Marino, as I stir fresh basil and oregano into the sauce. “Which is why Bryce and Ethan have always had cats.”

“You’re kidding me, right? We know why the hell the Odd Couple has cats. Gay guys are into cats.”

“That’s a terrible stereotype, not to mention ridiculous.” A few pinches of brown sugar would be nice, and some red pepper flakes.

“You know, that same guy who played Felix Unger also played Quincy. You ever stop to think about that and how long ago it was?”