The Bone Bed

guy like me still likes paper. She has lots of features, an embarrassment of riches, shouldn’t take long. Are we hot?” He pauses at the door leading into the scanning room as if it’s a military operations area that might be dangerous.
    “The scanner’s offline,” I tell him. “You know how to slide out the table?”
    “I do.” He takes off his coat.
    “Presumably because her initials are PLS,” Douglas Burke explains. “One might suspect that’s where
please
comes from.”
    “You’re on Twitter, aren’t you, Kay?” Valerie Hahn acts as if we’re friends.
    “Barely.” I’m beginning to understand, or I think I do. “I don’t use it to socialize or communicate.”
    “Well, I know you never tweeted Peggy Lynn Stanton, whose handle on Twitter is
Pretty Please,
” Hahn says.
    “I don’t tweet anyone.”
    Marino, what have you done?
    “It’s easy enough to see that you two weren’t tweeting each other.” Hahn is quite sure of herself. “One doesn’t even need admin privileges to see that.”
    “I don’t think we need to get into this level of detail right now.” Benton watches Ned Adams through glass.
    “I think we do.” I look at him until he looks at me.
    “Suffice it to say that at least something useful came from all the television coverage.” I can read Benton’s reluctance in the flatness of his eyes. “Our office in Boston got phone calls, Cambridge got phone calls, Chicago and Florida got calls, at least a dozen people certain the dead woman is Peggy Stanton, whom these people said they haven’t seen or heard from, apparently, since at least May, when she was supposed to be on her way to her Lake Michigan cottage or possibly Palm Beach. People here assumed she was in Illinois and people up there assumed she was still here. Some people assumed she was in Florida.”
    “People? As in friends?” It is all I can do to mask how much I don’t like this.
    “Various volunteer groups and churches.” Benton knows exactly what I’m feeling, but it doesn’t matter.
    This is how we do our jobs. This is how we live.
    “Apparently she was very involved in eldercare. Here, in Chicago, in Florida,” he says.
    “She has family and they haven’t wondered where she is after all these months?” I think about what Marino said to me in the car this morning when we were on our way to the Coast Guard base.
    “Her husband and two kids died thirteen years ago when their private plane crashed.” Benton reports the information objectively, and he can sound so cold.
    But that’s not who he is.
    “An investment broker with a hefty life insurance policy,” he reports. “Left her fairly well off, not that she was poor to begin with.”
    “None of her vendors have complained that she’s not paying her bills? No one noticed she wasn’t answering e-mails or her phone?” I don’t say what I’m thinking.
    How simple it would be to hoodwink Marino in cyberspace, where he doesn’t know how to navigate and his insecurity makes him vulnerable.
    “She’s been paying her bills all this time,” Benton replies. “She was tweeting as recently as two weeks ago. She’s made calls from her cell phone as recently as the day before yesterday—”
    “Not the person in there. She certainly didn’t.” Luke interrupts Benton while watching Ned Adams through the window.
    “Someone’s been doing it.” Benton finishes what he was saying, but he doesn’t say it to Luke.
    Inside the scanner room, Ned Adams opens his black leather bag. He puts his glasses on. He squints up at a video screen displaying dental x-rays.
    “She’s been dead quite a lot longer than two days or two weeks,” Luke volunteers, when he really should shut up. “She certainly hasn’t been tweeting or writing checks or making phone calls for quite some time. Months, at least, I’d say. Would you agree, Dr. Scarpetta?”
    “Her house is on Sixth Street,” Benton says to me. “Very close to Cambridge P.D., which just makes this all the more curious. No one’s been in it. The alarm is set, the car in the garage, police driving past it every day, and no one the wiser.”
    “A time capsule,” Douglas Burke adds. “The fire department’s at the ready to breach the back door as soon as we get there.”
    “I suggest you might want to go pick up those pizzas I asked you to order,” I say to Benton in a way that communicates exactly what I want him to know.
    This is my office. The CFC doesn’t answer to the FBI. I