The Bone Bed

basement. Nothing hooked up yet. Maybe he drops by a couple times to finish and no one’s answering the door. Maybe he leaves a note in her mailbox.”
    “Maybe.”
    “And whoever is impersonating her sends him a check. The perp had to have his address.” Machado’s talking to me and looking at Lucy.
    “Howard Roth, forty-two years old, died over the weekend at his central Cambridge home.” She reads what she’s just pulled up. “Bateman Street. You can Google it.”
    “So maybe that’s how, and he gets the check in the mail,” Machado says. “He has no account at Peggy Stanton’s bank and nothing that might inspire a teller to hand over a hundred bucks to him.”
    “Her bank would have her signature card on file, and it’s not a great forgery.” I sit next to Lucy.
    “I agree with you there.”
    Machado pulls up a chair and unzips his briefcase.
    “If you put her signature and this one side by side?”
    He slides out two plastic bags, and Toby is taking his time.
    “So maybe some teller pulled up her signature card and got a bad feeling, wouldn’t cash it for him, plus his driver’s license isn’t valid, like I said. And that might be what the bank was calling about,” Machado says. “There are a couple messages on her answering machine from Wells Fargo, asking her to call. First one in early June, about the time the check was mailed to Howie.”
    “How do you know it was mailed?” Lucy scans information scrolling by on every screen, what I recognize as files her search engines are finding.
    I can’t tell what they are. I can’t decipher what I’m seeing, and that’s deliberate, because I’m not alone.
    “What’s called the power of deduction.” Machado continues looking at my niece as if she might not be a waste of his time.
    She’s in faded jeans, a long-sleeved white T-shirt that is tight and could use ironing, and tactical boots. I’m aware of the big ring on her index finger as she moves the wireless mouse. I smell her cologne, and I can tell when she wants people to leave us alone because she has something important on her mind.
    “If someone stole her identity,” Machado is saying, “then this person wasn’t going to show up at Howie’s house and hand him a check, right? Safest thing would be to mail it. My guess is it’s the same thing this person was doing with her other bills. Forging checks and mailing them, and the bank probably wasn’t going to question checks made out to the gas, electric, and telephone companies. But they might pull up her signature card when someone walks in and looks like a homeless person.”
    “It’s not a good forgery, hardly a serious attempt at it,” Lucy says.
    I have two transparent plastic bags side by side, the check Howard Roth never cashed, and an earlier canceled one that Machado found in a file of bank statements inside Peggy Stanton’s house.
    “Not signed but written or basically drawn.” She moves close to me, her eyes locked on Toby as he finally leaves.
    “I didn’t realize she was a handwriting expert,” Machado says, and now he’s openly flirting with my niece.
    “I don’t have to be an expert.” She gets up and shuts her door, and Machado watches her as if she’s a tartar. “Somebody lousy.”
    “Maybe he got better at it,” I reply. “June first was early on.”
    Lucy sits back down. “Since when is Toby in charge of mail?”
    “I sent Bryce on an errand,” I reply. “He’s taking Shaw to the vet. In fact, I’m hoping he’ll fall in love with her and decide Indy needs a sister.”
    “The shaft of the letter
P
?” Lucy slides the plastic bags closer.
    She isn’t going to talk about Toby in front of Machado. She’s got something to tell me.
    “Slants differently, and you can see where the person hesitated,” she says. “Thinking it instead of doing it, and the line is slightly crooked, the shaft is. Plus, her
t
has a high cross bar and the other doesn’t. Her
a
is well formed, and the other’s not. Her
n
looks more like a
w,
and the tops are pointed, and the other’s rounded.” She shows us as she describes it, adding, “Just my thoughts. I’m not an expert.”
    “You ever testify in court about this stuff?” Machado can’t take his eyes off her.
    “I never testify in court about anything.”
    “I don’t get it. You’d be great in court.”
    “They can’t stipulate me.”
    “Why not?”
    She doesn’t answer. Lucy was fired by law enforcement. She’s a hacker. A shrewd