The Bone Bed

away from the SUV and the bottle smashes to the pavement and the rag flutters off like a ghost as he runs.
    I open the back door and step out unsteadily, my bare feet numb, and the tarmac we’re parked on suddenly is a confusion of strobing emergency lights, cars marked and unmarked roaring in, and he is running toward an old brick warehouse on the water, and Marino and Lucy are on top of him.
    He falls, tumbles headlong, as if he’s diving into the asphalt, or maybe Lucy kicked his feet out from under him, I can’t tell. But Marino is all over him, punching and yelling, and then a young woman appears as if she’s been conjured up. For an instant, I wonder if I’m dreaming again.

forty
    SHE MATERIALIZES OUT OF FLASHING BRIGHT LIGHTS and darkness, emerging from behind my SUV, where I realize a black Maserati is parked, its big engine rumbling throatily. She asks if I’m all right, and I tell her I’m fine, and I don’t know her and I do.
    “He might just kill him. All right, Marino. That’s enough. Not that I blame him.” She’s staring in the direction of the warehouse, and I’m staring at her face. “You sure you’re okay? Let’s get you in the back of a cruiser and I’ll find something for your feet.”
    She’s cut her hair quite short, and it looks more blond than brown, still very pretty but older, mid-thirties, about Lucy’s age. When I saw her last she was barely twenty, and she puts an arm around me and walks me to Sil Machado’s Crown Vic as he’s boiling out of it. I climb into the backseat and sit with the door wide open, and I rub my feet.
    “I guess someone will explain things,” I say to Janet.
    The last time I saw her must have been fifteen years ago, when she and Lucy were sharing an apartment in Washington, D.C. Lucy was ATF and Janet was FBI. I always liked her. They were good together, and nothing’s been all that good for Lucy ever since.
    “I notice you don’t seem to have a gun handy, don’t seem to be looking to arrest anyone,” I say to her, “and I’m sorry if I’m bleary. If only my head would fall off. Maybe then it would stop hurting.”
    “I’m not with the Bureau anymore, not even a cop,” Janet says. “A lawyer, one of those awful people, only worse. I specialize in environmental law, so I’m pretty much hated.”
    “Just don’t adopt a pig. Lucy’s been threatening it. And it will be me taking care of it when she’s out of town, which is often.”
    “I guess you don’t know what he did with your shoes.”
    “There should be a box of boot covers in the back.” I point at the SUV I was just held hostage in, and it occurs to me that all the CFC vehicles are equipped with satellite locators. “The ones with PVC soles so I can walk around in them,” I say to her. “You followed me here. But why?”
    “You texted Lucy you would call her as soon as you got in the car,” she says. “And you didn’t.”
    “And that was enough for her to start tracking me?”
    “She does it more than you think. Tracks you, me, pretty much everyone. And she could see you were at Fayth House and then were heading toward Boston instead of toward home. Plus, you’d left some rather urgent messages for Benton.”
    She explains to me that they were very close to Fayth House anyway, taking Marino back to his Cambridge house, and were talking about the significance of Mildred Lott going out in the dark.
    “She thought she heard Jasmine in the backyard,” Janet says. “She was calling out the name of her dog.”
    I’m aware that Lucy has been working with British and German researchers on computer-based lip-reading technology, and Janet says the software is now good enough to use when people are turned as much as a hundred and sixty degrees sideways. In other words, you can barely see their mouths moving but the computer does.
    “And she was turned away from the camera, looking in the direction of where she heard whatever she heard,” Janet says. “The security camera caught her from the side only, and it sort of does look, a little bit, at least, like she’s saying her husband’s name.”
    I’m searching for Benton, wondering if he’s here. He must have alerted agents, the police, and if so, I know what that means. He found out what I feared is true. Douglas Burke came here to do battle with Channing Lott, whose shipping headquarters looms in the distance beyond the dry-docked hospital ship, a huge white prewar building with hundreds of windows, most of