The Bone Bed

to where she was found.”
    “You might be right,” I reply, as we speed back toward Boston’s inner harbor. “The way the body was tethered, she couldn’t have been dragged very far without being pulled apart.”
    “Five thirty-four-pound bags soaked with water, and when that shit gets wet it weighs even more and sticks together like concrete,” Marino says. “So it’s not like something that was going to dissolve and leach out of the bags anytime soon. Plus, the weight of the crate. We’re talking at least one-sixty, maybe two hundred pounds, pulling on the body. A hell of a lot of stress on her neck.”
    “Any idea how long she’s been in the water?” Labella turns around in his chair, the boat slapping up and down as we speed through the bay.
    “Probably not long.” I think about Channing Lott’s trial, about the timing. “The big question’s going to be where she died and where she’s been since.”
    “It doesn’t look like her,” Marino says to me, and there’s no need for him to elaborate.
    I know what he’s conveying, and the thought crossed my mind, too, at first, but only briefly, only long enough to be face-to-face with her. She isn’t remotely familiar. I’ve studied photographs of Mildred Lott, a very young fifty, shapely and fit, with long blond hair and all the perfections her financial status could afford. I know about her every surgery, liposuction, and injection, having familiarized myself with records the police provided for me after she disappeared from her Gloucester home last March.
    “I have no idea who she is, but it’s not her,” I inform Marino, the Boston skyline straight ahead. “I don’t need to wait for DNA to tell us that.”
    “Someone’s going to make a stink about it being her until we let everyone know otherwise,” he predicts.
    “We won’t be letting anyone know anything until she’s identified and it’s safe to release information that’s not going to help whoever did this.”
    “If she’d been torn into pieces and we couldn’t recover her? Everyone would believe it’s Mildred Lott.” Marino is thinking about my appearing in court today. “People would be sure of it.” He’s saying a jury would. “They’d believe she turned up after all these months, and maybe that’s the point of the way she was rigged. To also rig the trial, to booby-trap it so the case falls apart at the last minute.”
    He’s referring to the notorious antics of Jill Donoghue, and as I understand it, I’m the last witness the defense is calling before resting a case that’s been spectacularly highlighted in the news.
    “You got to admit the timing’s unusual. In fact, it’s damn scary,” he says. “I’m not sure it isn’t deliberate.”
    “Channing Lott is in jail,” I remind him. “He has been since April. And it’s not his missing wife.” I stress that. “It’s someone else.”

twelve
    IT’S THREE MINUTES PAST ONE WHEN WE REACH THE Longfellow Bridge connecting Boston to Cambridge.
    On the other side, MIT’s playing fields and buildings have lost their charm, are squared shapes of dull grass, dark brick, and washed-out limestone beneath a thick tarp of gray clouds. Trees waiting for fall are suddenly skeletal, as if they’ve flung their parched leaves in despair, and the Charles River is roughly stirred by a blustery wind that matches my own agitation.
    I read the text message again, wondering why I think it might say something different this time:
    Just back in session after adjourning for lunch. Still on for 2. Sorry.—DS
    I refrain from answering Dan Steward, the assistant U.S. attorney whose fault it partly or maybe mostly is that I’m being dragged into court at what couldn’t be a worse time or for a more ridiculous reason.
    From now on I’ll communicate with him by phone or in person. Not in writing again ever, I promise myself, and I can’t get over it. How awful. I’m thinking in headlines, and most of all I’m worrying about the dead woman in the van behind us. She deserves my complete attention right now and won’t get it. This is wrong.
    “I’ve always lived over a microscope,” I comment to Marino. “Now I live under one, every bit of minutiae open for examination and opinion. I don’t know how we’re going to do this.” I tuck my phone back inside my jacket pocket.
    “You and me both. I got no idea who to call first, and I’m sure as hell not doing what the Coast Guard said and bringing in the FBI right off