The Bone Bed

when to get mail out of her box, probably at least once a week? Knows when garbage collection is. I hate what happened back there. I mean, Burke was out of bounds.”
    “I don’t know how much mail she got.” I’m not going to discuss what he’s just brought up.
    “Me and Marino ride Harleys together. Which is how we got in tight.” Machado stares past me. “He drops by with pizza, to have coffee, sometimes we meet up at the gym, a real good guy and respects the hell out of you. I had no idea. I mean, I don’t know what to say except I know what he feels about you. I know he’d take a bullet.”
    “I’m assuming this person was getting her mail once a week or a couple times a month at an hour when he’s not likely to be seen. The obvious point would be he didn’t want to raise suspicions and have people looking for her while he still had her body, storing it wherever he did for months.” I’m not going to talk about Marino with him. “Do you have that keychain with you?”
    “Okay, sure.” He reaches over the back of the seat and finds the brown paper bag.
    He opens it and pulls out a smaller bag that has the car key inside it, and he hands it out the window to me.
    “Never had a case where someone’s this brazen. Well, it’s not normal, Doc.”
    “When is murder normal?” I hold the transparent bag up and illuminate it with the light from my phone.
    “So you think it’s some sicko who lives in a sick fantasy world, but he looks like the average man on the street.”
    “What do you think?” The car key is infrared, with a battery, the compass attached to it by a quick-key-release chain with a split ring at either end.
    “Yeah, no doubt about it. Someone who blends. Someone no one thinks twice about.”
    “A pull-apart key holder that looks fairly new.” I hand the bag back to him. “Connecting the key of an eighteen-year-old Mercedes to a compass that’s vintage.”
    “Vintage meaning what? Like as old as the car?” He returns the plastic bag to the brown paper one.
    “Meaning I think you’re going to find Girl Scouts haven’t used compasses like this one in recent memory. I’m going to guess at least fifty years.”
    “You kidding me? So maybe it was Peggy Stanton’s.”
    “She was forty-nine, so it was before her time, too, and it depends on where she got the compass or where someone did.” I check on the cat again. “An old compass, an old coin ring, and antique buttons sewn on the jacket she had on? Someone into history and collectibles, but who?”
    “You go on in,” Machado says. “I’m going to wait and follow you home, just to make sure. I’d feel better.”
    I head to the green awning over the entrance and go inside, rolling a cart to the aisle for pet supplies, where I find a litter box and scoop, and clumping litter, Wellness food and treats, and several toys. I find soothing oatmeal and flea shampoos and a nail trimmer, and when I return to my SUV and open the back door, Shaw is sitting on the backseat with her hind legs straight out, the way Scottish Folds sit, which is unlike the way any other cats sit.
    “Come on.” I pick her up, conscious of Machado parked nearby with his headlights burning. “Let’s get you back in the towel and in my lap, okay?”
    She doesn’t fight or resist me in the slightest as I drive home with Machado right behind me, and I wonder what he’s worried about. I can’t help but suspect he knows something he’s not saying, and maybe it’s related to Marino, but it seems impossible that Machado could think for even a minute that Marino has anything to do with Peggy Stanton’s death or a missing paleontologist. But it depends on what Machado’s been told, especially if Burke’s the one doing the telling.
    I drive south, cutting over to Garfield, to Oxford, working my way toward Harvard’s divinity school, to Norton’s Woods, where the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is dark on its densely wooded acres. The pavement hisses wetly beneath my tires, Machado right behind me as I turn off Kirkland and onto Irving Street. Our three-story Federal-style house is white, with black shutters and a slate roof, and I can’t tell if Benton is home. I pull into our narrow brick driveway and park to one side of the detached garage, and Machado stops on the street and waits as I get groceries and Shaw out of my car.
    I unlock the door of the glassed-in porch, and the alarm begins to beep. Entering the code, I step inside and shove