The Bone Bed

point of it, and I try to imagine who.
    “We’ve got a problem with Toby, but he’s too damn stupid,” Lucy then says, and I figured she would get to him, based on her demeanor when he appeared at her door with a cartload of boxes.
    “No way he’s doing it,” she adds.
    “Obviously he’s doing something.” I wait for her to tell me what as I wonder why it’s so difficult to find people to trust.
    “You need to be careful about anything you say in front of him or anything he might overhear or see.” Lucy says she started getting suspicious of Toby over recent weeks, about the time Channing Lott’s trial began.
    She would run into Toby in areas of the building where he generally doesn’t need to be. The mailroom, for example, where he started picking up packages that gave him an excuse to stop by the computer lab, various offices, and intake, the autopsy rooms, conference rooms, locker rooms, the break room. Often he was going through the log at the security desk, she describes, as if he was intensely curious about bodies going out and coming in, especially if they were unidentified, in cases that occurred when he wasn’t working.
    “It wasn’t typical,” Lucy says. “At first I thought it’s because of Marino, because of him not bothering with the electronic calendar anymore, staying over, ornamenting, and maybe Toby saw an opportunity. But truth is, he was trumping up reasons to walk in and out of rooms where meetings were going on, where people were talking, where information was out in plain view.”
    She tells me that after I got the disturbing e-mail on Sunday night she decided to look into Toby, who can’t access anything at the CFC, including Investigations, without his key card ID, which has an RFID chip embedded in it. We also have satellite tracking on all our vehicles, she says, but Toby just didn’t think she’d look.
    “I guess it never dawned on him I’d start rolling back the tape and checking what’s been recorded by the cameras and the vehicle GPS locators,” she says, and I recall watching Toby on the security monitors yesterday, when he was inside the bay.
    He seemed to be arguing with someone on the phone. Something had struck me about it, bothered me. It didn’t seem normal.
    “He’s been entering all sorts of areas where he has no business,” Lucy continues. “Your office. Luke’s office.”
    “He can’t unlock my office.” It’s not accessible by key card, and I don’t wear such an ID on a lanyard around my neck.
    I can unlock any door in the building by scanning my thumb, and Lucy, Bryce, and I are the only staff who have what I call the skeleton key, a biometric one.
    “And your door is usually wide open if you’re in the building, or Bryce’s door is wide open,” Lucy points out. “He’s always leaving his door open and also the door connecting your office to his. So Toby finds reasons to deliver things, check on this or that, or asks a question or passes on information or volunteers to take orders for take-out food. Or he simply wanders in and out if he thinks no one’s looking.”
    I get up from my chair and reach for the phone as Lucy lets me know the jury is out. For an instant I think she’s talking about Toby, that she’s saying it’s up in the air what to do with him. Then I realize she means something else.
    “It’s all over the Internet,” she says, as I dial the extension for the autopsy room. “The jury’s left the courtroom, and the pundits are predicting they’ll find him not guilty.”
    I get hold of Luke and ask him to place Howard Roth’s clothing in ID and to e-mail all photographs to me, that I’m coming down now.
    “Perhaps Toby? He’s right here. Maybe he can . . . ?” Luke is busy.
    “No. I want you to do it personally and lock the door. I don’t want anybody near the clothing and whatever else came in with him.”
    “Shorts, socks, a T-shirt, his meds. The police have any other personal effects, his wallet, his house keys, not sure what all.” Luke’s in the middle of an autopsy and doesn’t want to be interrupted, but that’s too bad.
    “Thanks. I’ll take a look.”
    “I mean, they didn’t even have to think about it. Not guilty,” Lucy says, when we’re in the corridor, and she shuts her door, making sure it’s locked.
    “Is what you suspect about Toby why you were looking around my office yesterday morning? Is he why you were acting as if someone might be spying on me?” I