The Bone Bed

internship
, I remember saying bitterly to Anna as we sat in her living room close to the fire with the lights out because I’ve always found it easier to talk in the dark.
I did. Me, her influential, powerful aunt.
    Didn’t quite lead to what you intended, did it?
    Carrie used her. . . .
    Made Lucy gay?
    You don’t make people gay
, I said, and Anna the psychiatrist abruptly got up, the firelight moving on her proud fine face, and she walked away, as if she had another appointment.
    “I know you don’t want to hear it.” Marino keeps talking. “But I’m going to point out that you hired Luke in early July and this dinosaur lady disappeared barely six weeks later from the very area where they’re extracting the oil his father’s invested in.”
    The entire region of northwest Canada is dependent on natural gas and oil production, he says, and if the completion of that pipeline gets blocked, Luke’s father probably stands to lose a fortune—a fortune that would be inherited by Luke.
    “All of it,” Marino says. “He’s the only one left. And we know the e-mail with the cut-off ear and maybe Emma Shubert in the jetboat was sent to you from Boston, from Logan. Where the hell was Luke yesterday at six-thirty p.m.?”
    “How would Emma Shubert’s disappearance relate to the pipeline being further delayed or blocked?” I ask him. “Explain how what you’re suggesting makes sense at all or is anything more than wild theorizing. Because in my mind if it turns out that she’s been murdered and it’s connected to the pipeline, that will only outrage the detractors, the environmentalists more. It certainly can’t improve public sentiment if the brutal death of a paleontologist is connected with it.”
    “Maybe that’s the point,” he says. “Like those investors who bet against the housing market and made a killing because it collapsed.”
    “Good God, Marino.”
    He is quiet for a moment.
    “Look. I realize I’ve not always made the best choices in staff.” I’ll give him that, because it’s beyond dispute, and I resist pointing out there are those who would say that my hiring him is a prime example. “I don’t always have the best judgment about people closest to me.” Including Pete Marino, but I will never say it to him.
    When we first met more than two decades ago he was a homicide detective in Richmond, a recent transplant from NYPD to the former Capital of the Confederacy, where I had been installed as Virginia’s new chief medical examiner, the first woman ever appointed to that position. Marino went out of his way to be a bigoted ass at the onset of our working lives together, and there have been betrayals since. But I keep him and would choose no one over him because I’m loyal and I care and he’s just as good as he is bad. We’re an unlikely pair and probably always will be.
    “I couldn’t be more aware that whoever I choose impacts everyone,” I add in the same calm voice, as I do my best to be patient with his insecurities and fears and to remind myself I’m far from perfect. “But please don’t assume that if I know someone personally it somehow obviates any possibility of him being a good employee or even a civilized human being.”
    “That was something when the Bruins won the Stanley Cup.” It’s Marino’s way of ending a conversation that no longer furthers his agenda. “Wonder if it will happen again in my lifetime.”
    The TD Garden, or the Garden, as the locals refer to the arena, looms ahead of us on the left, and on Commercial Street, the Coast Guard base is only minutes away.
    “I’ve seen a couple of them around here out with their wives, walking their dogs. Really nice guys, not snooty or nothing,” Marino says, and up ahead at the intersection a Boston cop is directing traffic.
    “I think there’s a funeral.” I notice black hearses and orange traffic cones across from the ice-skating rink.
    “Okay. We’ll hang a right here and cut through on Hanover.” He begins to do it as he says it. “I tweeted a couple of them, but they’re not going to answer when you’re anonymous and can’t even use your own photo for your avatar.”
    “They might not do it, anyway, I’m sorry to tell you.”
    “Yeah, I guess when you got fifty thousand people following you. I only got one hundred and twenty-two,” he says.
    “That’s quite a lot of friends to have.”
    “Hell, I don’t got a clue who they are,” he says. “They think I’m Jeff