The Bone Bed

later looked at by a monster. He probably went through every file saved on her phone, the same phone he used to take a photograph of a severed ear, what we’re supposed to assume is her ear.
    The same phone that e-mailed the video and the jpg to me.
    “He got what he wanted.” Douglas Burke pushes back her chair, and no one answers her. “He’s out, a free man, right?” She looks incensed. “Channing Lott benefited from what’s going on, and in fact is the only individual who has benefited from it.”
    She gets up and walks to the closed conference room door. She looks angry enough to hurt someone.
    “He was in jail when Peggy Stanton vanished.” Benton calmly looks at her, and she defiantly stares back at him. “He was in jail when Emma Shubert disappeared. He certainly didn’t kill them or anyone while he was locked up in jail.”
    “Crimes elaborately staged so we’re thinking serial murders. Why?” Burke is saying this to Benton, as if Val Hahn and I aren’t here. “To cover, to obfuscate the ultimate goal, which is getting rid of his wife and getting away with it.”
    “He was locked up. That’s a fact,” Benton says.
    “So someone did his bidding,” Burke answers him. “Someone makes sure Peggy Stanton’s body shows up exactly when it did and is filmed and he gets acquitted. Genius, I have to say. Amazing what money can buy.”
    “This killer acts alone,” Benton says. “Elaborate, yes. But not so we’ll
think
serial murders. They
are
serial murders.”
    “You know what, Benton?” She opens the conference room door. “You’re not always right.”

thirty-eight
    I WANT PASTA OR PIZZA AND HAVE ASKED BENTON TO stop on his way home, which won’t be anytime soon, he warned me, when we were leaving the CFC separately.
    Both of us alone. Prepossessed and preoccupied. Off to where we need to go, and that is the sum of us individually and together. I know full well when something isn’t important to anyone but me.
    “Food,” I told my husband, as I was driving alone out of my parking lot. “God, I’m hungry. I’m starved,” I said on my way to handle what no one else can be bothered with, and I check my rearview mirror again and the dark blue Ford LTD is right behind me.
    I follow the Charles River as it bends and snakes, curving like the corridors in my building, taking me where I’ve begun and ended, where I’ve been and will go, past the DeWolfe Boathouse again, past the Morse School playground again, heading in the direction of Howard Roth’s neighborhood again, on my way to Fayth House. The dark blue Ford is on my bumper, and I see the face with dark glasses in my rearview mirror.
    Watching me, daring me. Brazenly following me.
    “Food and wine,” I told Benton over the phone a little while ago, when I didn’t know this would happen, and I’m shocked.
    I’m incensed and disbelieving, and at the same time not sure why I’m surprised.
    “We will eat together, be together, all of us,” I said, alone and hungry and beginning to feel worn down by it all, a single question burning on the dark horizon of my dark thoughts.
    I watch the car behind me, my heart turning hard like something vital dying and petrifying into my own bone bed of emotion.
Now you’ve gone too far
, I think.
You’ve really gone too far
, and I imagine dinner with Lucy, Benton, Marino. I’m hungry and angry and want to be with people I care about, and I’ve had enough, because it’s too much now. I turn right on River Street, and Douglas Burke turns, too, her dark glasses staring.
    I pull into the parking lot of the Rite Aid at the intersection of Blackstone and River Streets, letting her know I’m aware that she’s been on my tail for the past ten minutes and I’m not going to be harassed by her and I’m not afraid of her, either. I roll down the window of my SUV, and we are driver’s door to driver’s door like two cops, like comrades, which we’re certainly not.
    We’re enemies, and she’s openly letting me know it.
    “What is it, Douglas?” I’ve never been able to call her Doug or Dougie.
    It’s all I can do to call her anything.
    “I wasn’t going to say this in front of them.” Her glasses are dark green or black, and the sun is low, the old low buildings of Cambridge casting long shadows, a low late-afternoon well on its way to the lowest time of the year around here, a New England brutal winter.
    “Out of professional respect, I didn’t bring it up with them in the