The Bone Bed

there’s a garden hose outside, and most redemption facilities require recyclables to be emptied and rinsed, and I also haven’t noticed any odors. I tell him that if he doesn’t object I’m going to see what’s in this one bag and then I’m going to look for blood.
    “Thing is, we find the check and bingo.” Machado continues to describe what I don’t think is possible. “Some lowlife who killed Peggy Stanton. Her handyman did it and then died in a drunken accident. The killer sets that up and we think case closed.”
    “And where does the killer think we’ll assume Roth kept the body after he supposedly murdered her?” I inquire, as I untwist the tie. “Where might he have kept it long enough for it to begin to mummify? Certainly not in this house over the summer, and are we supposed to believe Howard Roth had a boat or access to one?”
    “Maybe the killer assumed she wouldn’t look mummified,” Machado says. “Maybe he thought she wouldn’t look dehydrated after she was in the water for a while.”
    “Mummified remains don’t reconstitute like freeze-dried fruit. You can’t add moisture back to a dead body.”
    I open the bag, and the bottle is right on top of other bottles and cans and jars. It’s right there where the monster placed it.
    “But would the average person know that a dried-out body wouldn’t rehydrate?” Machado asks.
    The forty-ounce Steel Reserve 211 bottle is the same as the two empties by the recliner, each with a price sticker from a Shop Quik.
    “I’m not going to do anything with this here,” I say to Machado, as I hold up the bottle in my gloved hands, turning it in sunlight shining through a window. “I see ridge detail, and I see blood.”

thirty-three
    I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY A KILLER WHO HAS ELABORATE fantasies and premeditates and seems meticulous makes so little effort to hide evidence that matters. In fact, I’m baffled, I tell Benton.
    “You’ve got to focus on his priorities,” he says, as he drives us through mid-Cambridge. “You have to get inside his head and know what he values. Neatness, tidiness, everything exactly the way he likes it. Restoring order after he kills. Showing he’s a nice guy, a decent guy, someone civilized. I’m suspicious the flowers in Peggy Stanton’s house were from him. When he returned her car and entered her house he left flowers to show what a sterling fellow he is.”
    “Any luck finding a record of a delivery?”
    “Not any of the florists in the area. It’s been checked.” He glances at his phone, and he’s been glancing at it a lot. “I think there was no card because there never was one, that he walked in with a spring arrangement like a thoughtful son stopping by to see his mother. It’s very important to this person that what he believes about himself is reasserted after he’s killed. A great guy. A gentleman. Someone capable of meaningful relationships.”
    “What he did to Howard Roth wasn’t exactly gentlemanly, and he certainly didn’t leave him flowers.”
    “Howard Roth had no value.” Benton glances at another text message, and I wonder if it is Douglas Burke who is writing to him every other minute. “He was an object no better than the trash he dug through, and the killer assumed you wouldn’t value him, either. He assumed it would be a case that wouldn’t merit your attention.”
    “Me specifically?”
    “What it tells me is whoever he is, he doesn’t know you personally. I retract what I said earlier about my worrying he knows you, knows Marino. He knows about you, about your office, but he doesn’t know you,” Benton says, as if there can be no doubt about it. “He’s getting it wrong. He’s making mistakes. Maybe you could text Bryce to let them know we’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
    It’s almost three p.m., and we’re going to be late for a meeting Benton scheduled in my TelePresence conference room, and I’m not happy that Douglas Burke has been included. I thought Benton made it perfectly clear that they couldn’t work together anymore.
    “He stages his crimes in a premeditated and precise way, he’s obsessed with games that include framing people, and then is careless about fingerprints and blood?” I worry again that something might have gone on with Benton and Burke.
    “He has reason to believe such evidence isn’t incriminating to him,” he says, as we go back to the CFC the way we came, following the river, and the water is dusky, the sky a