The Bone Bed

plan?” Toby pulls on gloves and opens the tailgate. “You want her in decomp? I assume she’s a homicide, probably dead first and dumped so she would sink, right? Really weird shit. Any idea who she is?”
    “We need a few minutes with her before she goes into the cooler, and don’t assume nothing,” Marino says gruffly.
    “You’ll do her in the morning?”
    “I’m definitely not waiting until the morning,” I answer him. “As soon as I’m out of court I’m back here. She’s going to be in bad shape very fast. Let’s bring her straight into decomp, and we’ll get a temperature and some photos. We can weigh and measure her later.”
    Toby unlocks the wheels of the stretcher with its black body bag that looks oversized and pitifully flat, as if what’s zipped inside has shrunk in transit.
    “What about the other stuff?” he asks.
    In the back of the cargo area are the black plastic–covered shapes of what was recovered from the bay.
    “All of it will go to trace, but not now,” I tell him. “Let’s get everything inside ID.”
    I instruct him to cover a table with disposable sheets and place all of the items inside, and to document them with photographs and lock the door. When I’m back from court I’ll remove the wrappings, take a look and find out what interest or questions the police or FBI might have in the fishing gear, the boat fender, and all the rest. We’ll submit all this to trace evidence first thing tomorrow morning, I tell Toby, and I ask him to give Ernie Koppel, the section chief, a heads-up about what’s coming.
    “Everything locked up tight and secured,” I repeat. “Nobody’s to touch anything without clearing it with me first.”
    They lift the stretcher out, slam shut the tailgate, and roll the body inside and toward the decomp room as the bay door begins to loudly crank back down. I stop by the security guard’s window and check the sign-in log again, relieved that no other cases have come in since I last looked. The two motor-vehicle fatalities have been autopsied, their bodies picked up by funeral homes. That leaves the blunt-force trauma and possible drug overdose suicide to be released. Luke Zenner did those autopsies, I notice, and that’s what I’ve come to expect. It’s his nature to request the most complicated cases or assign them to himself because he wants experience and loves a challenge.
    “Is there anything I need to know about?” I ask Ron, through his open window.
    “No, ma’am, Chief,” he answers from inside his office, where security monitors mounted on three walls are split into quadrants, each showing exterior and interior areas of special interest for surveillance. “It’s been real quiet. Just two pickups, with another on the way.”
    “We’ll be in decomp for a few minutes, then I’ve got court,” I let him know. “Hopefully they won’t hold me up too long. Marino and I will be coming straight back here to take care of this post.”
    “You going to do her today?” he says, to my surprise.
    I haven’t mentioned or indicated to him or anyone in my building that the victim in this case is a woman. Only Marino and Toby know.
    “Yes. No matter how late it is,” I reply, as I fill in the log. “Since we don’t know who she is, let’s enter her as an unidentified white female found in the Massachusetts Bay.”
    He begins typing into fields of a software package that programs a Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, chip embedded in a smart label. Checking scene notes for the GPS coordinates, I give those to him, too, as Toby reappears, pushing an empty gurney in a hurry and loudly shoving open the door that leads out of the autopsy floor and into the bay. A laser printer sounds, and Ron slides out a yellow silicone bracelet and the smart label embedded with the information I just gave him about our most recently accessioned case.
    “What have you been hearing?” I question him casually, as security cameras pick up Toby rolling the gurney toward the white transport van.
    “Well, Toby said we have a Jane Doe coming in, that it could be the lady who’s been missing, the one you’re going to court about,” Ron says. “I guess you also were filmed by some TV crews while you were out there.”
    “What makes you think it was TV crews, as in more than one?” I ask while I watch Toby from different angles on split screens.
    He parks the gurney at the back of the van, points the key to unlock it, and I notice his lips are