The Bone Bed

hell?”
    The lights go on inside the bay, the heavy door cranking up, and in the widening space is the dark green low-slung hood of Lucy’s Aston Martin backed in next to my SUV.
    “Shit.” Marino drives inside. “You expecting her?”
    “I’m not expecting anyone.”
    We get out, the shutting of the Tahoe’s doors echoing off concrete, and I scan my thumb in the biometric lock. Then we’re inside the receiving area of the autopsy floor with no sign of the nighttime security guard, but I detect voices along the corridor. People talking, several of them, and as Marino and I approach ID, we find the door open wide. The yellow boat fender, dog crate, and other evidence are plainly visible inside on tables, and as we get closer to the large-scale x-ray room I can hear my technologist Anne. I hear Luke Zenner, and the security guard appears around the bend.
    “Who unlocked ID?” I ask him. “Is everything all right, George?”
    “You got company.” He talks to me and won’t look at Marino.
    “So it seems.”
    “Mr. Wesley and some of his people are in there with Anne and Dr. Zenner. Don’t know what it’s about.”
    I don’t believe he doesn’t know, and he stares straight ahead as he walks off, jaw muscles clenching. The red light is illuminated over the door of the x-ray room, indicating the scanner is in use, and I’m not expecting my husband to be dressed the way he is, in running clothes, his silver hair wetly combed back. He’s with Cambridge Police Detective Sil Machado and FBI Special Agent Douglas Burke and another woman I’ve never seen before, very short dark hair, maybe in her mid-thirties. I’m startled. I feel betrayed.
    “For the most part, it’s the opposite with CT,” Anne is saying from her work station, Luke sitting next to her in a chair he’s rolled up.
    On the other side of the leaded glass, bare feet with shriveled toes and pink-painted clipped nails protrude from the bore of the eggshell-white Siemens SOMATOM Sensation scanner, and on video displays are images belonging to an
Unidentified white female from MA Bay,
I read. I can’t understand why Anne and Luke have started without me. I made it clear I didn’t want the body removed from the cooler. I gave a specific directive that the body wasn’t to be touched, that the doors to the ID and decomp rooms were to remain locked until I returned from court.
    “What’s going on?” I meet Benton’s eyes and see what’s in them. “What’s happened?”
    He’s in a crimson Harvard Medical School sweat suit and running shoes, a rain jacket draped over an arm, and I suspect he was at the gym when someone interrupted him. Probably Douglas Burke, it enters my mind, the tall brunette far too feminine and pretty for the names she goes by, Doug or Dougie, and it’s not uncommon for her to vanish with Benton, to be unaccounted for. It could be any hour of the day or night or on a weekend or a holiday, and often I’m told nothing, and I know when not to ask, but now isn’t one of those times.
    When we have a moment alone I will demand that Benton tell me exactly what is going on, because I can tell by the hard set of his jaw and tension in his sharp-featured face that something is, and it occurs to me that he hasn’t spoken to Marino or looked at him. Benton is completely avoiding Marino, as are Special Agent Burke and Machado and the woman I’ve never met. Only Anne and Luke are acting as if all is normal, oblivious to the real reason the FBI and police are here, which isn’t because they want to watch a CT scan or an autopsy.
    “How’s everybody doing?” Marino asks, and only Anne replies that she’s doing fine, and I can tell he senses something is off.
    “I was just explaining that CT is pretty much the opposite of MR in some regards, blood showing up bright on CT, while it’s dark on MR,” Anne explains to Marino and me.
    No one responds, and the tension gets thicker.
    “But not so with other fluids—specifically, water—because water isn’t dense,” Anne explains to Machado and Burke, and to the woman I don’t know, whom I suspect is FBI.
    I hold Benton’s gaze, waiting.
    “These areas here and here?” Anne indicates the sinuses, the lungs, the stomach displayed in 3-D on different computer screens. “If they were showing up really dark, pretty much black, it could indicate the presence of water, which would be typical in a drowning. CT is really great in drowning cases. Sometimes when you open up