The Bone Bed

testimony claimed the Anthony home computer was used for Internet searches on how to make chloroform and that traces of it were detected in Casey Anthony’s car trunk. While none of this resulted in a conviction, it could have planted a diabolical idea into a demented person’s head. One can shop at the hardware store and find instructions online to mix up chloroform in the garage or kitchen or workplace and use it to incapacitate or kill.
    “Maybe he knocks them out.” Phillis continues to offer possibilities. “Drives off with them in his car trunk so if they come to in transit, they can’t pose a problem, can’t struggle with him.”
    “He may use a boat,” I reply, recalling what was said to me.
    Mildred Lott was so afraid of a kidnapper or someone else with criminal intentions mooring a boat behind the Gloucester mansion that she inquired about insurance and asked that the deep-water dock be removed, a request her husband denied because of his yacht
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Who, in addition to him and key members of his staff, knew she was consumed by this worry? It would be a dangerous suggestion to make to the wrong person.
    Don’t announce what you fear could happen or someone evil might make it come true.
    “Brain’s going to be your best bet. Chloroform binds to proteins and lipids. It infiltrates neurons,” I say to Phillis, as I get up from my desk and notice the two SUVs that were picked up on security cameras moments ago as they waited for the gate to open.
    The black Yukon driven by Channing Lott turns east on the street below, perhaps returning to his headquarters in Boston’s Marine Industrial Park. It interests me that he is alone with his young, attractive CFO, while Galbraith, in a silver Jeep with a mesh grille, heads the opposite way toward Harvard.
    “Assuming the victim wasn’t kept alive long after it was used,” Phillis Jobe lets me know. “Two or three hours, maybe four. After that, we might not find it.”
    Kept alive for what? An assault of some type that may not be physical, and I think of Peggy Stanton’s undigested food. I imagine her eating dinner somewhere that April night and being grabbed or knocked out as she was returning to wherever she was parked, then driven someplace, possibly in her own car. What I’m certain of is at some point she was conscious long enough to break her nails and step in red-stained wooden fibers that got embedded in the bottoms of her feet, and I recall the inside of her closets and dresser.
    I envision the neatly folded clothes hanging and on shelves and in drawers, slacks and pantsuits, sweaters and blouses, old and unstylish, and not a single pair of nylon stockings, yet her dead body had on torn pantyhose. I imagine her waking up in a nightmare, inside the place he held her, a place where he had no fear of discovery and could completely control her.
    I wonder if he had dressed her in hose, a skirt, a jacket with antique buttons by then, if she regained consciousness in clothing that didn’t fit and wasn’t hers. Or did he force her to dress herself in a costume that means something to him, perhaps garments that once belonged to the original source of whom and what he hates?
    Peggy Stanton had a cluster of contusions on her upper right arm, what appear to be fingertip bruises, and I think of Luke’s speculation that they weren’t inflicted through clothing but rather by someone gripping her bare skin. He theorized that the killer terrorized and humiliated her by stripping her nude the same way prisoners of war are tortured, and I don’t think that’s it.
    I don’t believe the killer wanted her naked. I think he wanted her dressed for the role he sadistically cast her in, and months after she was dead and desiccated he adjusted the wardrobe, the jewelry, so it didn’t fall off her mummified body when he pushed it overboard into the bay. I explain all this to Ernie Koppel as I continue making evidence rounds by phone.
    “I need to rule out that she was dressed this way when she left her house,” I say to him. “If at all possible, I’d like to answer that. This is a bad one, Ernie.”
    “I know.”
    “And I’m pushing everyone.”
    “Imagine that,” he says sportingly.
    I ask him about fibers he recovered from inside Peggy Stanton’s Mercedes, explaining that I saw no clothing inside her house remotely similar to what she had on when I recovered her body from the water.
    “I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to take a look,” I then