The Bone Bed

while concealed someplace freezing or near-freezing, cold enough to prevent bacteria from colonizing and causing the decomposition that is beginning with a vengeance now. Minute by minute her odor is stronger, and I’m asking for trouble. I imagine Judge Conry calling lawyers to the bench, wanting to know where I am, discreet at first, and then demanding.
    “Plenty of people collect in this part of the world.” Marino has a hard look on his face, his mood turned sour. “You go in some of these junk shops and can buy vintage buttons, almost anything you can think of. Police, fire department, railroad, military. But you don’t sew them on clothes, not even nickel-plated ones that go for five bucks apiece. Not even ones in really shitty shape you can buy in bulk.”
    “Since when are you an expert in vintage buttons?” I spread the blouse open next to the blazer.
    “You really don’t care.” He’s looking at the clock, and it’s exactly two.
    “What I care about most right this minute is getting what we need while there’s still a chance.”
    Mostly I’m thinking about DNA. I’ve had cases where semen could still be recovered after a remarkably long time inside orifices, the stomach, the airway, deep inside the vaginal vault, and I’m not going to assume it’s too late to get anything from this body, no matter how long she’s been dead. The enemy of DNA is bacteria, and she’s invisibly beginning to teem with it, and it literally will eat her to the bone.
    I can gauge the breaking down of her tissue by the way she smells, insidiously foul at first and then much stronger and fast becoming a bristling stench from organisms that originated in her bowels but were dormant while she was kept dry and very cold or frozen. As she has warmed by degrees in the bay, in the boat and van, and now inside this room, the bacteria that cause putrefaction are having their way with her. They have begun a process I might be able to retard slightly by refrigeration but certainly can’t stop. She’s decomposing rapidly right before our eyes.
    “Remember when I first got into metal detectors?” Marino is asking, and I really don’t recall.
    “Vaguely.” I reach around to unzip her long gray skirt, discovering a bunched area of the waistband that has been cinched.
    Three heavy-duty staples fasten inches of the material together. Stainless steel, no sign of rust.
    “Why the hell do that?” Marino looks on.
    “Like I said, she’s not a size six anymore.”
    “If she ever was.”
    “When she was alive, she was bigger than this,” I reply. “That much is a fact.”
    “But if the skirt slid off her because it was too big, it wouldn’t have been lost because of the rope around her ankles and the dog crate,” he says. “Why go to the trouble?”
    “It depends on when it was done. All I can say with certainty is someone made the waistband smaller.” I pull the skirt down over her wrinkled bare pale legs, surprised to find what’s left of sheer pantyhose.
    The stockings are in tatters, ripped off mid-thigh, and in my mind I see her alive. I see her terrified, locked up and trying to escape.
    Clawing, pounding a door, breaking her nails. Frantically moving around shoeless on a surface covered with something dark red.
    Then nothing; the picture blanks out. I can’t imagine what happened to her stockings except the legs weren’t cut with anything sharp. The ultra-sheer nylon has runs all the way up through the control top, and what is left around the thighs is shredded, torn unevenly, like ragged transparent gauze loose around her sallow dead skin. Did she rip off her hose mid-thigh? If so, why?
    Or did someone else do it?
    The same person who stapled the skirt around the waistband and arranged jewelry so it wouldn’t fall off the body and be lost.
    Like the jacket, the skirt is distinctive, quite stylish, constructed of two jersey layers that flow into a raw-edged handkerchief hem,
Peruvian Connection,
size six. I spread it on the sheet to dry as Marino resumes reminiscing about our early days together in Richmond, when apparently he became quite the treasure hunter, using a metal detector he kept in the trunk of his unmarked Ford to search crime scenes, primarily outdoor ones, for metal evidence, such as cartridge cases.
    “Mainly when I was working evening shifts and had most of the day off,” he’s saying, but the memory doesn’t make him cheerful and boisterous, the way he usually gets when he talks