The Bone Bed

case Douglas Burke must solve in her life isn’t a bank robbery or serial murders but the crime of her own existence. I don’t know what happened to her, probably when she was a child. I also don’t care.
    “He knows it, too,” she says to me, through the open window of her Bureau car. “It’s a shame you don’t want what’s best for him. Trying to sabotage me isn’t going to help your pathetic excuse for a marriage, Kay.”
    “Go back to your office and talk to someone.” I am careful not to sound provocative. “Tell someone what you just told me, share the information, maybe with your SAC, with Jim.” I say it clinically, dispassionately, almost kindly. “You need to talk to someone.”
    She needs help, and she’s not going to get it, and I have a strong feeling about what she’s going to do, and when I drive away toward mid-Cambridge, I let Benton know.
    “I think she intends to confront Channing Lott.” I leave him a voicemail because he’s not answering his phone. “She’s over the edge, and someone needs to intervene. Someone needs to stop her immediately to protect her from herself.”
    I pull into a Starbucks to get a coffee, a double shot, black, as if that will help me collect my thoughts, as if caffeine will calm me, and I sit in my car for a few minutes and try Benton again. Next I text him, making sure he somehow gets the message that he needs to intervene without delay before Douglas Burke does something foolish, dangerous, possibly irreparable. She’s unstable and obsessed and armed. I drop my unfinished coffee in the trash and drive off, wondering if I should warn Lucy and decide against it. I’m not sure what she might do.
    It is dark, the sun below a blackened horizon when I reach Fayth House, a brick complex, tidy and relatively modern, with deliberately placed flowerbeds and trees. A silver SUV is pulling out as I turn in, leaving very few cars in the parking lot, and I suspect most of the residents in the retirement community don’t drive. I walk inside a pleasant lobby with blue carpet and blue furniture and silk flowers, and Americana prints and posters on the walls that remind me of Peggy Stanton’s checks.
    The receptionist is a stout woman with frizzy brown hair and thick glasses, and I ask her who’s in charge.
    “Which resident are you here to see?” she says, with a cheerful smile.
    I ask her if there is a director. I realize it’s after hours, but is there someone in administration I can talk to? It’s important, I let her know.
    “I don’t believe Mrs. Hoyt has left yet. She had a late meeting.” The receptionist picks up the phone to make sure, and I notice a fall arrangement of fresh flowers on a table behind her, burgundy Asiatic lilies, purple lisianthus, orange roses, and yellow oak leaves.
    A floral delivery with no card. Someone, possibly the receptionist, has taped to the vase a piece of paper from a Fayth House memo pad, a name with a room number written on it that I can’t make out from where I stand. But I recognize
It’s her
Bday
written in large print and underlined
.
    “Cindy? There’s someone here to see you? I’m sorry,” the receptionist says to me. “What’s your name?”
    I’m directed to an office at the end of a long hallway that takes me past a brightly decorated dining room where residents are finishing dinner, some of them in wheelchairs, a lot of walkers and canes by the tables. The beauty salon is closed for the night, and an elderly man is playing the piano in a music room, and a cleaning cart is parked outside the library. I notice boxes of commercial trash-can liners, a hundred to a carton, the same brand I found inside Howard Roth’s house.
    I walk on to the administrative offices and knock on the open door of the one at the end where Mrs. Hoyt, young and very pregnant, is putting on her coat. I introduce myself and shake her hand and she seems puzzled.
    “Yes, I recognized the name when Betty just told me,” she says. “Do you have family here? I saw you on the news yesterday. That huge turtle on the fireboat and then the poor woman. What can I help you with? Do you have family here?” she again asks. “I would think I would know.”
    She sits down at the desk with her coat on.
    “Or maybe you’re considering Fayth House for someone?”
    I take a chair across from her and reply that my mother lives in Miami and is stubborn about leaving her house even though she probably shouldn’t be on her own anymore.