The Bone Bed

ask me to get rid of it, which I certainly didn’t want to do, as on occasion I moor the
Cipriano
there.”
    “Your yacht?” I ask, because I can’t help it.
    If he in fact is charged with some other crime, I’ve just ensured I will be a witness, possibly for the defense again.
    “Was your yacht docked there the night she vanished?” I then ask, because I don’t care about Jill Donoghue.
    I care about the truth.
    “It wasn’t,” he answers. “It was spending the winter in Saint-Tropez. I usually don’t have it brought back to this area until May.”
    I open the door adjoining my office to Bryce’s and give him the envelope, telling him to e-mail copies of the security video to Lucy and me. I let him know that he can show our guests out, and Channing Lott gives me a card, engraved on creamy paper of heavy stock. He’s written his private telephone numbers on it.
    “Millie wouldn’t go with anyone, even if a gun was pointed at her head.” He pauses in the corridor, his eyes intensely locked on mine. “If someone tried to grab her in our backyard, she would have fought like hell. He’d have to shoot her on the spot right then and there.”

thirty-five
    TOXICOLOGY IN PEGGY STANTON’S CASE IS LIKE SEARCHING for a needle in a haystack when the needle may not be a needle and the hay may not be hay. I can’t grab at straws and wildly guess. I can’t demand every special drug screen imaginable without running out of samples and Phillis Jobe running out of patience.
    “An ordeal, I admit,” I say to my chief toxicologist over the phone. “I’m asking a lot and offering very little, I know.”
    Frozen sections of liver, kidney, and brain are in poor condition that will only worsen and be consumed with each test we run. I don’t have urine or vitreous fluid. I don’t have a single tube of blood.
    “It’s like pulling a sword from a stone, but I believe it can be done.” I’m at my desk inside my office, where the doors are shut as I explore possibilities with confidence I didn’t feel before. “I believe we’ve got a chance if we try a very practical approach.”
    New insights about Mildred Lott combined with what I know about Peggy Stanton lead in a more obvious direction, which I suspect strongly is the same direction for each victim, whether it is two or three or, God forbid, more. If what Benton has projected is true and the killer is murdering the same woman every time, perhaps his mother or some other powerful female figure, then he likely picks the same type of woman, at least symbolically, and chooses the same way of overpowering her.
    “No possible injection sites you found when you posted her?” Phillis gets to that.
    “None we could see,” I reply. “Her skin wasn’t in great condition, but we went over her very carefully with injection sites in mind, with any injury in mind. What seems probable if not evident at this point is she was last home on the early Friday evening of April twenty-seventh, fed her cat, unset and reset her alarm system at about six p.m., when she headed out with her pocketbook and keys. Most likely she drove off in her Mercedes and had an encounter that ended in a place where she was held hostage and killed. Possibly the same place where her body was frozen or kept in cold storage until she was weighted down and dumped in the bay as recently as yesterday or the night before.”
    “If the same person killed Mildred Lott, I wonder why her body’s not been found,” Phillis says.
    “Not found
yet
.” I know what Benton’s opinion is, that the killer keeps the bodies because he doesn’t want to give them up. “Part of the fantasy may be the aftermath, not letting them go, continuing some bizarre relationship he has with them,” I explain.
    “Necrophilia?”
    “No evidence with Peggy Stanton, but I can’t absolutely rule it out. Although I doubt it, to be honest. But if Mildred Lott was his first victim, his attachment to whatever she symbolized, his fantasy, in her case likely is stronger. She may be more personal to him, but that doesn’t mean his interest is overtly sexual. Benton thinks it’s about degrading, about power, about destruction.”
    “She disappeared about six weeks before this one did.” Before Peggy Stanton did, Phillis means. “Any other missing women we know of who might be even earlier?”
    “There are always missing people. But no similar case comes to mind. If Mildred Lott was his first, he likely has stronger feelings