got coffee in this place, course what I’d really like is a beer, but forget it.”
“Let’s back up a minute.” I shut the door. “I thought I’d made it clear not to start this case without me.” I address this to Anne, to Luke. “So if what I’m seeing is the result of the FBI coming in here and giving directives to speed things along, that’s not how it works,” I add, and I’m not nice about it.
“It’s not like that,” Luke says to me.
But it is like that.
“The ID room is wide open, and you’ve started the scan when that wasn’t my instruction,” I reply.
Luke turns his chair around so he’s facing me, and there’s no sign he’s concerned about my displeasure or worried about why Marino was just removed from the room like a prisoner. Luke feels justified in what’s unfolding, and in part this is due to inexperience, and it may be he’s far more narcissistic than he seems, his well-mannered graciousness belying the ego I’d expect to accompany his blond good looks and gifted mind. My deputy chief is rather enamored of federal law enforcement agencies, the Secret Service and especially the FBI, which has managed to muscle him into rushing this case along, and I simply won’t allow it.
“I wasn’t going to start the autopsy without you,” Luke explains, in his reasonable, pleasant British accent, dressed in scrubs, surgical clogs, and a lab coat with his name embroidered on it. “But we thought it might be expedient to go ahead and scan her while you were on your way back from court. Mainly because of the condition she’s in, I doubted we’d find much on CT, anyway.”
“And there’s basically nothing.” Anne’s tone is subdued, unnerved by my reaction to what she and Luke have done, and she’s probably upset about Marino, who flirts and kids with her, and for a while was giving her rides to work every day when she broke her foot. “No internal injuries,” she says quietly, 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.”