The Bone Bed

assumed this person shopped for new items that couldn’t be traced.”
    I clean the measuring tape and return it to a drawer, and I change my gloves.
    “But you can see this fender’s rubbed up against something, suggesting it’s not new,” I explain. “It’s used. Possibly it was removed from a large boat.”
    “Someone with money,” Lucy says. “Channing Lott has a hundred-and-fifty-footer he docks in Boston. Some of the time it’s in Gloucester, a very well-known yacht.”
    “Why the airport in Beverly?” I ask if there’s a special reason to keep a helicopter there.
    “He has a hangar in Beverly, has hangars in a lot of places,” Lucy says. “Beverly’s convenient to Gloucester, where his oceanfront mansion is, where his wife disappeared from.”
    I open a large black plastic case and get out a handheld crime light and goggles, and Lucy dims the lights in the room. I start with the wavelength for blue, painting it over the black shirt, and a galaxy of fibers and debris fluoresce in different colors and intensities. What look like orange-hot coils and multicolored ones are probably synthetics, and those that are coarse I associate with carpet. The clothing front and back is dirty with construction dust and debris, bits of paint and glass, and animal and human hair, much of it from contact with flooring, I suspect.
    I feel the thick stiffness of dried blood I can barely see on the black fabric, dark voids where blood likely dripped from Howard Roth’s lacerated head, and I ask Lucy to turn the lights back on. Most of the blood is concentrated on the back of the collar and shoulders, as if he bled from the back of his head while he was lying faceup and blood seeped under him. I can imagine why Luke assumed the injury was caused when the body came to rest on the basement floor at the foot of the stairs, but I don’t believe it.
    “I’m sure it’s crossed your mind that what happened to his wife is similar to the other ones.” Lucy continues talking about Channing Lott.
    “I need scene pictures of Roth’s body as it was found. Check to see if Machado has sent them yet.”
    “His missing wife is in the same general age group, distinguished for one reason or another, a formidable woman.” Lucy returns to the computer. “She certainly wouldn’t appear to be in a high-risk category, and in fact quite the opposite. Scene pics have landed. Opening them now.”
    “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