The Bone Bed

and uncomfortable she’s been, and I imagine Peggy Stanton putting food and water into bowls in the kitchen. I imagine her collecting her pocketbook and keys, going out somewhere and fully intending to return home. But the next time the door opened, it wasn’t her coming in.
    A stranger using her house key, and he probably entered through the kitchen door so he wouldn’t be seen by the neighbors or by anyone on the street. This person who somehow abducted and killed her entered her alarm code and walked from room to room, leaving lights on in some of them, and I continue to be suspicious about the flowers and who they were from. I’m bothered by the car key found in the Lalique bowl, where I feel this person deliberately left it.
    Left it for whom?
    Flowers with no card. Fresh flowers that were never thrown away. Food and any perishables in the kitchen were cleaned out, but not the flowers, and I keep going back to that as I think of the key placed in the entryway near a door I doubt the killer used.
    Who were these things left for, really?
    I unlock my phone and call Sil Machado because I can’t call Marino.
    “It’s Dr. Scarpetta.”
    “What a coincidence.”
    “Why a coincidence?”
    “What’s going on, Doc?”
    “I’m pondering her car being inside the garage.” I head north to Porter Square.
    “Already delivered safe and sound to your bay. Why? What’s up?”
    “The key you found inside the house,” I say. “For sure it’s her car key?”
    “Yeah. I unlocked the driver’s door with it just to take a quick look but didn’t touch anything or try to start it.”
    “That’s good. And what about the keychain?”
    “I got the key, the keychain. Yeah.”
    “I’d like to see them at some point.”
    “Just a key and the pull-apart chain and an old black compass I’m thinking may have belonged to one of the little girls,” he says. “A Girl Scout compass. Maybe her little girls were Girl Scouts. Or Brownies, I guess. How old’s a girl got to be to go from a Brownie to a Girl Scout?”
    “We don’t know that her daughters were Brownies or Girl Scouts.”
    “The compass. Definitely a Girl Scout compass.”
    “I think it’s possible he drove her car to her house, returned it to her garage, and left the key where he did because he didn’t know where she usually kept keys,” I tell him. “Because he probably didn’t know her. But more important, maybe he left the key there for a reason, possibly a symbolic one.”
    “That’s interesting.”
    “He may never have been inside her house before and walked around inside it after she was dead,” I continue. “But we need to be careful not to let that be known. I wanted to make sure I said that to you because I have a strong feeling he might not realize anyone would figure it out.”
    “You mean that he went back in her house.”
    “I mean that he went in there at all. Even if it was only once.”
    “Interesting you’d say that, because I just got the alarm log. Other than the firefighters prying open the basement door with the hooligan?” He means a Halligan tool. “Last time the alarm system was disarmed was April twenty-ninth, a Sunday, at eleven-fifty p.m. Someone was inside the house for approximately one hour and then reset the alarm. Obviously this person left and never went back. There’s been no alarm activity since until tonight, like I said.”
    “Not even false alarms?”
    “All she’s got is door contacts. No motion sensors or glass breaks, none of the usual shit that goes off.”
    “And before April twenty-ninth?”
    “That previous Friday, the twenty-seventh,” he says. “A couple ins and outs, and then someone left around six p.m., reset the alarm, and it wasn’t disarmed again until Sunday the twenty-ninth at the time I just told you. At almost midnight.”
    “Possibly on that Friday night it was she who went out. She went somewhere, possibly in her car. And the person who came back late on Sunday was someone else.”
    “I’m with you so far.”
    “Did you happen to notice if her garbage cans had anything in them?” I ask.
    “Totally empty,” he says.
    “Trash collection’s on Mondays,” I reply. “I’m wondering if this person emptied her refrigerator of perishables, took out the garbage, and rolled her super-can curbside.”
    “Then rolled it back under the side porch?”
    “Yes. Possibly when this same person cleaned out her mailbox and suspended her newspaper delivery.”
    “Jesus. Who