The Bone Bed

Lott is or was almost six feet tall. Peggy Stanton, whose murder Channing Lott shouldn’t know about unless he had something to do with it or his lawyer’s been told, was barely five-foot-three. When she was visible on TV as I was getting her body into the Stokes basket, it was obvious she wasn’t tall. I know from examining her that her hair was white, not dyed blond, and that she had no scars from recent cosmetic surgeries, an abdominoplasty, a rhytidectomy.
    “It was the first thing all of us thought when it hit the news.” Al Galbraith reaches for his coffee, and he seems disquieted, as if the subject is a distasteful one. “No matter the condition, someone doesn’t get shorter,” he says awkwardly, as if he feels compelled to say something about his boss’s missing wife.
    “Postmortem changes, changes after death, don’t make someone shorter,” I agree.
    “An imposing woman,” Galbraith says, and it flickers in my mind he didn’t like her. “I think anybody who met Mrs. Lott was struck by how statuesque she was.”
    “Exactly,” Shelly Duke agrees, and it occurs to me that they don’t want to be here. “A stunning, overwhelming woman. She filled a room, just dominated it when she walked in, and I mean it in the best way,” she adds, with sadness that is unconvincing.
    Lott has made them come. They are as unsettled as one might expect them to be inside a forensic facility, sitting down with me and discussing someone I sense they had ambivalence about. I wonder if Jill Donoghue has masterminded this unscheduled meeting, but I can’t imagine a motive. She has boldly stated that there will be no double jeopardy in this case, that her client won’t be tried again for the same charge or anything similar.
    This nightmare is over but not the worst one,
Donoghue has been telling the media since the acquittal was announced this morning. Now Channing Lott gets to deal with his own victimization, because he’s the real victim here, she’s been saying, jailed for a crime he didn’t commit, as if the tragic loss of his wife wasn’t horrific enough.
    “Dr. Scarpetta, might I ask you a question?” He is completely focused on me, sitting very straight and turned in a way that tells me why his two chief executive officers are with him.
    He gives them his back and doesn’t look to either one for anything. They are witnesses, not trusted friends. Lott didn’t achieve what he has in life by being naïve or stupid. Even as I worry about his intentions, he’s ensuring I won’t be the one causing trouble.
    “I can’t promise I’ll be able to answer, but go ahead.” I recall what the Gloucester detectives Lorey and Kefe said when they met with me after Mildred Lott vanished.
    “You know the details, I assume. Millie was home alone in our Gloucester place on March eleventh, a Sunday,” Lott says, as if he’s making an opening statement.
    A vain woman who courted the rich and famous and had visited the White House more than once and had even met the Queen, the detectives described to me, and when I asked if they knew of anyone who might have wanted something bad to happen to Mildred Lott, they said to get out the phone book and point.
    Point to any page, they said. Could be anyone she’d ever stepped on, overworked, or underpaid, or had treated like
the help
, they claimed, and I remember thinking at the time how common it is that victims aren’t likable. No one deserves to be abducted, raped, murdered, robbed, or maimed, but that doesn’t mean the person didn’t deserve something.
    “She’d just relocated us back to Gloucester. We keep the house closed during the bleakest months of winter,” Lott repeats what he obviously has said many times before. “And I’d spoken to her at what was morning for me and about nine p.m. for her, and of course she was very upset. I was away on business in Asia and in fact had decided to cut short my trip because of the dog. Millie was a wreck.”
    “She may not know about Jasmine,” Shelly Duke prompts him. “Their dog,” she says to me.
    “Our shar-pei vanished on March eighth,” Lott explains. “The landscapers left the gate open again. It had happened before and Jasmine got out. Last time she was found frantic and lost, the police spotted her. The local police know her and an officer picked her up and brought her back to us. Then we weren’t so fortunate, it seemed at first. Police suspected someone stole her, a rare purebred, a miniature and not