The Bone Bed

seriously, not looking at Luke or Benton, at anyone but me. “No evidence of what might tell us why she’s dead. I mean, she’s got some cardiac calcifications, some intracranial ones that are common. Punctate in the basal ganglia, plus arachnoid granulations, typical with aging, in people over forty.”
    “Hold on, now.” Special Agent Burke is casual tonight in a brown sweater and black jeans, a leather shoulder bag likely concealing her gun. “Let’s not talk about turning forty.” She thinks she’s funny.
    “Evidence of atherosclerosis, calcification in some blood vessels.” Anne isn’t amused.
    “You can tell hardening of the arteries from a CT scan?” Nothing Burke does is going to lighten the mood. “Seems like that’s a good thing to find out before I eat another Whopper.”
    “Eat what you want; you don’t look like you’ve got a worry,” Luke says to her, and maybe he’s flirting. “They’ve found atherosclerosis in Egyptian mummies four thousand years old, so it’s not just a by-product of modern life. In fact, it’s probably part of our genetic makeup to be predisposed to it,” he adds, because he just doesn’t get it, or maybe he doesn’t care that Marino is in trouble.
    “I suppose we have to consider she might have died from a heart attack or stroke, in other words, natural causes, and someone decided to conceal the body, then get rid of it.” Burke’s eyes are steady on mine.
    “At this stage, it’s wise to consider everything, to keep an open mind,” I answer.
    “Nothing else radio-opaque except dental restorations,” Anne informs me. “And she has plenty of those. Crowns, implants, an expensive mouth.”
    “Ned’s coming in to compare charts,” Luke lets us know. “In fact, that’s probably him now.”
    Car lights are white and glaring on a closed-circuit security screen, a small blue hatchback, Ned Adams’s ancient Honda parking in the lot.
    “Then we must already have premortem x-rays for comparison.” I direct this to Benton.
    “Records we got from a dentist in Florida,” he says.
    “Who do we think this lady is?” I ask him.
    “It’s looking like she’s a forty-nine-year-old Cambridge resident named Peggy Lynn Stanton. She usually spends her summers at Lake Michigan, Kay,” my FBI husband replies, as if we are amicable colleagues. “Much of her time is spent away from Massachusetts. It appears it was her habit to be here usually in the winter and fall only.”
    “It seems strange to spend winters here. That’s usually when people leave,” I remark.
    “Sometimes she’d go to Florida,” Burke says. “There’s a lot to find out, obviously.”
    “Meaning friends, possibly her family, weren’t always sure where she was?” I ask dubiously. “What about telephone calls, e-mail . . . ?”
    “We sent agents to check,” Burke says. “Well, why don’t you pick up here?” She directs this to the woman I don’t know. “Valerie Hahn’s with our cyber squad.”
    “And for the record, everybody calls me Val.” She smiles at me, and she shouldn’t bother.
    I don’t feel friendly and am consumed by worry. What has Marino done?
    “The bottom line is it certainly appears she never got to her cottage on the lake,” Valerie Hahn says. “It’s totally abandoned. No luggage. Nothing in the fridge. It’s looking like she vanished into thin air around the first of May, possibly earlier, and Dr. Zenner mentioned that could be consistent with the condition of the body?”
    “I’ll know better when we autopsy her.” It rankles me that Luke has told them anything.
    “I don’t know if you might have heard her mentioned?” Valerie Hahn says to me.
    I open the door leading out into the corridor, where Ned Adams is headed toward us, carrying his old black leather medical bag.
    “Why would I have heard her mentioned?” I ask bluntly.
    “I’m just wondering if the name
Pretty Please
means anything to you, or perhaps anyone on your staff?” Hahn says.
    “Hello, Ned.” I hold open the door for him. “She’s in the scanner. Help yourself.”
    “I can do it in there. Sure.” He pushes back the hood of a long yellow raincoat that is dripping water on the floor. “Her films are up to date. Lots of crowns, implants, root canals, including a panoramic x-ray that’s good of the sinuses. You got those?”
    “I can put them up on the screens even as we speak.” Anne starts typing. “You want a printout, too?”
    “An old-fashioned