The Bone Bed

the body during autopsy, you lose the fluid before you can see it, especially if there’s water in the stomach. But we scan first and don’t miss anything.”
    “We wouldn’t expect her to have water in her lungs, her stomach, not anywhere,” I say to Anne, but my eyes are on Benton. “She’s moderately mummified. She hardly has a drop of fluid in her entire body, barely enough to blot a card for DNA, and if she’s a drowning, she didn’t drown recently.”
    My mind keeps going back to the way Marino acted earlier today, as if the dead woman was personally offensive to him. His upset over the vintage buttons on her jacket was bizarre, and I have an incredible premonition, an awful one.
    “She’d been dead quite a while by the time she was weighted down and dropped into the bay,” I’m saying, “and I’m wondering who called this gathering?”
    “We think we got an ID,” Sil Machado says.

twenty
    HE TURNS TO BENTON AND SPECIAL AGENT BURKE AND the woman I don’t know, as if it is up to them to continue, and I know what that means.
    The Portuguese Man of War, as Marino calls Sil Machado, is a young hotshot, built like a bull, with dark hair and eyes and preppy taste in clothes, and he’s not a devotee of the FBI and doesn’t turn over a case to them without question and in some instances without resistance. If he’s deferring to them even as we stand here, then the Feds already have taken over the investigation, and there has to be a justifiable cause for it.
    “How come nobody let me know?” Marino glares at Luke. “An ID based on what?” His tone is accusatory. “How’s that possible? It’s not like we could have DNA this fast, and forget a fingerprint match. That can’t happen without rehydrating her fingerpads, meaning we’re probably going to have to remove them first, which was what I planned to do—”
    “Tell you what, Pete,” Machado interrupts him. “Why don’t you come with me, and we’ll let them talk while we go over a few things?”
    “What?” Marino instantly is paranoid.
    “We’ll go over everything.”
    “You don’t want them talking in front of me?” Marino’s voice gets loud. “What the fuck!”
    “Come on, buddy.” Machado winks at him.
    “This is bullshit!”
    “Come on, Pete. Don’t be like that.” Machado gets close to him, puts a hand on his arm, and Marino tries to shake him off, and Machado grips him harder. “Let’s go take a load off, and I’ll explain.” He escorts Marino out into the corridor. “I know you got coffee in this place, course what I’d really like is a beer, but forget it.”
    “Let’s back up a minute.” I shut the door. “I thought I’d made it clear not to start this case without me.” I address this to Anne, to Luke. “So if what I’m seeing is the result of the FBI coming in here and giving directives to speed things along, that’s not how it works,” I add, and I’m not nice about it.
    “It’s not like that,” Luke says to me.
    But it is like that.
    “The ID room is wide open, and you’ve started the scan when that wasn’t my instruction,” I reply.
    Luke turns his chair around so he’s facing me, and there’s no sign he’s concerned about my displeasure or worried about why Marino was just removed from the room like a prisoner. Luke feels justified in what’s unfolding, and in part this is due to inexperience, and it may be he’s far more narcissistic than he seems, his well-mannered graciousness belying the ego I’d expect to accompany his blond good looks and gifted mind. My deputy chief is rather enamored of federal law enforcement agencies, the Secret Service and especially the FBI, which has managed to muscle him into rushing this case along, and I simply won’t allow it.
    “I wasn’t going to start the autopsy without you,” Luke explains, in his reasonable, pleasant British accent, dressed in scrubs, surgical clogs, and a lab coat with his name embroidered on it. “But we thought it might be expedient to go ahead and scan her while you were on your way back from court. Mainly because of the condition she’s in, I doubted we’d find much on CT, anyway.”
    “And there’s basically nothing.” Anne’s tone is subdued, unnerved by my reaction to what she and Luke have done, and she’s probably upset about Marino, who flirts and kids with her, and for a while was giving her rides to work every day when she broke her foot. “No internal injuries,” she says quietly,