The Bone Bed

the water,” Ernie adds, and I think about what Lucy just told me.
    Channing Lott’s shipping company offers a hundred-thousand-dollar award for solutions that help preserve the environment. I can’t imagine any of his tankers painted with a dangerous biocide or that any boat he might have would be, certainly not his yacht that he sometimes moors in the Boston Harbor.
    “It could be anything,” Benton says, after I tell him, and we’re climbing the weathered wooden front steps of Howard Roth’s three-room frame house, which doesn’t look as uncared for as it simply looks poor. “Any type of vessel or marine object originally painted with the antifouling stuff, from a buoy to a piling to a submarine. Then repainted.”
    “I doubt a submarine would be repainted red.” I notice a coiled garden hose connected to an outside faucet and wonder what Howard Roth used it for.
    There’s no grass, nothing to water, and he didn’t own a car.
    “More likely we’re talking about a boat bottom and maybe its prop that were repainted with primer, and then a red antifouling paint that’s environmentally safe and legal.” We put on gloves and shoe covers, and I open a rusting screen door.
    Sil Machado is waiting on a porch crowded with open black garbage bags overflowing with cans and bottles. Shopping carts are filled with bags, and more of them are stacked in the seats of a metal slat porch glider. I wonder how Howard Roth got his recyclables to a redemption center, and I ask Machado if he knows.
    “Nearest one’s on Webster Ave.” He unlocks the front door with a single key attached to an evidence tag. “I think his buddy from Fayth House used to give him rides. Jerry, the maintenance guy who found him.”
    He lets us in and stays outside because I intend to spray for blood if I don’t find any that’s visible, and there’s very little room inside. Machado explains through the open door that Roth’s friend, maybe his only friend, got a DUI and his license was suspended.
    “He told me on Sunday afternoon when I responded to the call that as soon as he got his license back he was going to help Howie haul all this in,” Machado says.
    “When might that have been?” Benton asks, and we’re just inside the door, covering our clothes. “When was he going to get his license reinstated and give him a ride?”
    “It was his first offense, so his license was revoked only for a year,” Machado says. “He has three months to go. He said he told Howie to stop collecting before the floor caved in, to hold off until he could drive him. But he went out every day, digging through trash anyway. Not sure what you get for this stuff. Maybe a couple bucks a bag, total? Enough for one quart of the shit he drank.”
    I crouch by an open scene case, getting out the spray bottle of LCV and the camera, scanning my surroundings before I do anything. The living room and kitchen are one open area separated by a Formica countertop, an old TV against one wall, a brown vinyl recliner parked in front of it, and that’s about the only place someone could sit.
    Bags of metal cans and glass and plastic bottles are piled on a sofa, on a small table and on its chairs, and I can understand Machado’s attitude when he first got here after the body was found. I know all too well what it’s like to walk into a death scene that is so overwhelmed by what obsessive unwell people collect or hoard or don’t bother throwing out that it’s like sifting through a landfill.
    “This isn’t just about the money.” Benton stands by the kitchen counter, looking, taking in every detail.
    “It’s sad,” I agree. “Maybe he started out collecting all this for whatever petty cash he could get, but then it became a compulsion.”
    “Another addiction.”
    “Addicted to digging through trash,” I reply, noticing all of the window shades are down, the shapes of bottles and cans showing behind the yellowed fabric as the light shines through.
    I ask Machado if the shades were just like this when he came here the first time. Were they down in every window and he tells me through the open door that they were, and I ask him about lamps or overhead lights. He replies that the only light on was the single lightbulb in the basement, and it’s probably still on, he adds, unless it’s burned out.
    “When you’re done,” he says, “I’m going to dust all the switches, swab them, if need be. I’ll go over anything someone might have touched.”
    “A