The Bone Bed

end up flying right past us over the river on what’s called the Fenway Route, in and out of Logan. Sure as hell got no idea what TV station it might be, if any, or how the hell they’d know we were out there and what we were doing. I know Judge Conry likes you, but you’re pushing your luck.”
    “I am because I have to,” I reply. “This lady can’t wait.”
    “You’d better hope the judge sees it that way.”
    The watch appears to be Art Deco, in white gold or platinum, the bezel set with diamonds or some other clear gemstones, the movement mechanical. The time on the white oblong face is frozen at four minutes past six o’clock, and I can’t know if that is a.m. or p.m. I can’t know the date the watch stopped.
    “Maybe some other type of filming,” Marino then considers. “If they’re filming a movie or commercial around here and whoever was flying just happened to see what we were doing and grabbed footage.”
    “It’s obviously not Lucy’s new bird.”
    “Haven’t seen it yet,” he says. “She’s too busy going after pig farmers to give me a ride.”
    “We won’t remove her jewelry now, but let’s get photos, lots of photos. She’s not going to look like this when we get back.”
    “Have got a shitload already, but I’ll get more.”
    “More is better.”
    “Why would it be Lucy’s?” Using the ruler as a scale, he places it next to the wrist wearing the watch. “She sure as hell wouldn’t be moonlighting for some TV station or film crew, or posting videos of you all over the Internet.”
    “Of course not.”
    “You should give her the tail number and ask her to run it,” he says. “I guarantee she’ll figure out who it is and why they were spying on us.”
    “We don’t know that whoever was in that white helicopter was spying. Maybe they were just curious. There also was a sailboat nearby,” I recall. “A tall ship with red sails that were furled. It was sitting out there maybe a hundred yards from us when we were getting her and the gear out of the water, and it never moved. I’ll e-mail the tail number to Lucy.”
    I dip swabs into distilled water.
    “If we can find out where this lady died, we might find pieces of her fingernails,” I decide. “No defensive injuries I can see so far, but she was doing something that broke all of her nails. Toenails, fingernails, every one of them.”
    I rub the cotton tips under each fingernail, and the swabs turn a reddish tint.
    “The same reddish staining that’s on her feet?” I wonder. “Whatever it is, I can’t get all of it. It’s way up in the quick.”
    I hold the red-tinted swabs under the surgical lamp and examine them with the magnifying lens.
    “Something fibrous, maybe,” I observe. “It reminds me of fiberglass insulation but more granular, like dust or dirt, and a darker color.”
    I cut her nails with a pair of small scissors, and pink-painted slivers make quiet clicking sounds as they drop into the bottom of a paper envelope I hold open.
    “I’ll take a look under the scope, then see what Ernie has to say,” I add, and I’m mindful of seconds slipping away, of time running out for the dead woman and me.
    I might get in trouble, it could happen, and I label nail clippings and swabs for trace and DNA, and arrange syringes with different-gauge needles on a surgical cart as the minute hand on the wall clock ticks closer to two p.m. My pulse picks up, but I can’t stop, and inside a glass cabinet I collect ETDA blood tubes and FTA cards, although I know without a doubt that getting blood from her is going to be a challenge. It will have seeped out of vessel walls long ago, and I’ll be lucky if I get enough to blot a card.
    “You scribe and keep taking pictures, and we’ll go at this really fast.” I check the flexibility of the neck, the arms, and try to separate the legs, but they’re stubborn. “Rigor’s indeterminate,” I dictate to Marino, and he writes it down as I remove the thermometer from the incision in her abdomen. “Temperature of her liver is forty-two degrees, and that’s interesting. Are we sure about the water temperature of the bay? Pamela Quick said it was fifty-one degrees.”
    “The temp on the Coast Guard boat’s GPS was fifty-one degrees,” Marino confirms. “Of course, it would have been a little colder as the water got deeper.”
    “Nine degrees colder at the depth where she was held in place by the ropes?” I doubt it. “And she didn’t get colder in