The Bone Bed

will handle this case as I see fit.
    “I’m posting her first. Her house can wait,” I add, in the same tone. “It’s waited half a year. It can wait two hours longer, but she can’t.”
    “We were hoping Dr. Zenner could take care of the autopsy and you’d come with us and take a look,” Burke suggests.
    “Whatever you need me to do.” Luke gets up from his chair as Anne walks into the scanner room and hands printouts to Ned Adams.
    “What I need is for you to give us a chance to do our job here,” I reply, as the x-ray room door opens, and now Lucy is here, looking at me from the corridor. “Searching a potential crime scene is much more meaningful if we know how the victim died and what we might be looking for.”
    “Could I see you for a minute?” Lucy doesn’t step inside.
    “If you’ll excuse me. I think we’re done for now,” I say to the FBI.
    “I noticed your car in the bay.” I walk with Lucy back toward the receiving area, stopping where no one can overhear us. “I’m wondering why.”
    “And I’m wondering a lot of things.” My niece is dressed the way she was when I saw her early this morning, all in black, and it’s not like her to show up when the FBI is in the area. “I’m wondering why Marino and Machado are in the break room with the door shut. I can hear them arguing, that’s how loud Marino is. And I’m wondering why a Sikorsky S-Seventy-six belonging to Channing Lott might have filmed you recovering that body from the water today?”
    “His helicopter? That’s stunning.” I hardly know what to say.
    With all that’s gone on since, I haven’t given the large white helicopter another thought since I e-mailed the tail number to Lucy while I was in the car with Marino, heading to court.
    “That’s really rather unbelievable,” I add, as my thoughts dart through possibilities of what I should do.
    Dan Steward needs to know before closing arguments. If Channing Lott somehow is behind his helicopter filming what we just watched in court, and I don’t know how he couldn’t be, then the jury should know before it begins to deliberate. But it may be too late for that.
    “The Certificate of Airworthiness is registered in Delaware to his shipping company,” Lucy informs me.
    I can imagine how it would appear if I call Steward with this information and he’s forced to say in open court or even to the judge who the source is. The information would be damaging to Jill Donoghue.
    Stay out of it.
    “His fleet of some hundred and fifty car carriers, container ships, the M V Cipriano Lines,” my niece is telling me.
    “I’m sorry.” I try to focus on what she’s saying.
    “What the chopper’s registered to,” she says. “A shipping company named after his missing wife, Mildred Vivian Cipriano. Her name before they got married.”

twenty-one
    AROUND THE CFC, FORENSIC DENTIST NED ADAMS IS known as the tooth whisperer because of what the dead confide in him. Age, economic status, hygiene, and if that’s not enough to tattle about, teeth snitch on diet, drink, drugs, and if the person were pregnant or had acne or an eating disorder.
    In his late sixties, slightly stooped, with bad knees and a deeply wrinkled face that has smiled more than frowned, Ned can determine minutiae from a single tooth that the deceased’s closest friends and family likely never knew or imagined. Peggy Lynn Stanton, he confirms, as we wheel her body along the corridor after weighing and measuring it in the receiving area, was victimized in life by a very bad dentist, who, as Ned puts it, cost her or someone “an arm and a leg.”
    “A Dr. Pulling; now, how’s that for a name? Only he sure didn’t live up to it in her case, as I’m about to tell you.” Ned stiffly accompanies Luke and me toward the decomp cooler, his raincoat draped over his arm, a buoyant air about him, because his mission is successfully accomplished and he’s in no hurry to go home to an empty house. “Some cosmetic dentist in Palm Beach, Florida, who didn’t comply with the standard of care; not saying it was intentional. Maybe just incompetence.”
    “Yeah, right,” Luke says sarcastically. “Where’s the loot?”
    “Tooth number eight, a maxillary central incisor with extensive internal root resorption coupled with a buccal fistula,” Ned says. “You can’t miss this big internal radiolucency in the middle of the pulp canal in her pre- and postmortem radiographs.”
    “This is under a crown?” I