The Bone Bed

them dark at this hour.
    “I could see someone like a prosecutor thinking that or wanting to think it,” Janet is saying. “Not
Channing
but
Jasmine
. She was calling her dog and looked really happy, thrilled and excited but frantic, and now we know why.”
    My feet aren’t numb anymore, and now they’re itching.
    “Not exactly,” I reply. “Why did she think her dog was out there?”
    “Either he had the dog with him or more likely he had a recording,” she says. “If he stole the dog days earlier and recorded it barking.”
    I continue to rub my feet as Janet walks over to the SUV and opens the tailgate.
    “Try one of the big orange cases,” I call out to her, and police are everywhere, and Al Galbraith is in cuffs and is being placed in the back of an FBI sedan.
    I look around at Boston cops and agents and Machado, and then I see Benton with uniformed officers who are breaching the entrance of the warehouse. What I don’t see is any sign of Douglas Burke. Three loud thuds of a lightweight battering ram and the door gives and is opened, and there are lights on inside a cavernous open space where I can see rows of shiny steel machines on wheels and coils of hoses and hundreds of wooden barrels stacked against a far wall.
    Benton and the others approach a shut metal door, and I can make out the reddish tint to the floor and hear what sounds like steam blasting. I remember Burke’s accusatory comments about Crystal Carbon2, a
green
way to do industrial cleaning. Solid carbon-dioxide blasting, she said. Compressed air propelling dry-ice pellets at supersonic speeds, and carbon dioxide is one of the simplest and most common asphyxiants known.
    Colorless, odorless, it is one and a half times heavier than air, so it flows downslope and settles, displacing oxygen. In a confined space at a concentration of ten percent a person loses consciousness in less than a minute and will asphyxiate, and Al Galbraith was right.
    Nothing will show up on autopsy, not a damn thing, unless the person is burned. At more than minus one hundred degrees Fahrenheit dry ice causes frostbite, is so cold it may as well be hot, and I think of the strange hard brown areas on Peggy Stanton’s arm and feet and her broken nails and ripped pantyhose.
    He locked her in that room behind that shut metal door and turned on a machine, and she knew she was going to die if she couldn’t turn it off. She got close to the white fog blasting out of the nozzle, reached for it, kicked at it, and it burned her. I imagine her darting about, banging on the door, clawing at the nylon hose that weren’t hers, maybe wrapping her hands in shreds of stockings to protect her skin as she tried again, and the concentration of CO 2 rose.
    Janet returns with boot covers, and I pull them on, frustrated that I don’t have my phone. I get out of the car and awkwardly trot, my feet still not quite belonging to me, it seems. I head toward the warehouse, where all the trucks are parked, and the sound of compressed air blasting is coming from behind the closed metal door, and it must be locked because the police have the battering ram ready.
    Red woody fibers are like a fine coating of soil or dirt on wire shelves arranged with accessories. Hoses, nozzles, insulated gloves, and the fine debris coats stainless-steel surfaces of blasting machines and scores of hard case insulated coolers and containers, what the dry-ice pellets likely are shipped in.
    “You’re going to need to take serious precautions, people lose consciousness incredibly fast, don’t even feel it coming,” I say to Benton, and I put my hand on his arm. “We need to make sure all the CO 2 has been vented outside.”
    “I know,” he says, and I see it in his eyes.
    He’s afraid Douglas Burke is in that room.
    “She came here,” Benton says.
    “He must have been here and then went to Fayth House to see his mother, to leave birthday flowers for her. His mother must be a resident there, and he must have spotted me pulling in.”
    “Everybody back!” The cop takes his stance and swings the battering ram behind him.
    “A secretary told Doug that Channing Lott was gone for the day and directed her to his chief of operations. To this place. It was around five-thirty,” Benton says.
    The iron ram slams the door.
    “Not long after I saw her,” I reply. “When she was following me and I left you the messages.”
    “Why are you holding a scalpel?” Benton asks, and I realize he doesn’t