Inside are framed photographs that I look through, all of them of her, a pretty woman with jet-black hair and dark sparkling eyes, vibrant and not at all the way I have imagined her after examining her dead body and now her belongings. In riding clothes, and hiking and kayaking, and a picture of her in Paris when she must have been in her twenties, someone adventuresome and full of life before her world stopped.
“I seriously doubt she was looking for a romantic relationship or was the sort to connect with a stranger on the Internet who called himself The Dude,” I remark. “There’s not the slightest suggestion she was an avid bowler, no bowling shoes or balls or trophies, I assume? And no clothing or jewelry I’ve seen in photographs is remotely similar to what the body had on. It doesn’t appear to be the right size. It would have been too small for her, at least when she was alive and not mummified.”
“What I’m just wondering is if the conditions necessary for a body to mummify rapidly might be manufactured,” Burke says.
“Whatever she had on when she was abducted or vanished,” I add, “isn’t what she was wearing in the bay. She was dressed. She was staged. Someone did it for a reason.”
For his pleasure. I think of what Benton said. The killer choreographs what makes him feel important and powerful. Whatever it is, he plays it out with victims who have nothing to do with him. They aren’t who he’s kidnapping and killing.
“Might mummification be induced artificially?” Burke says, and I know what she wants.
“You mean if the body were placed inside a very hot, dry space, for example”—I give her the pitch she’s waiting for—“and left to dehydrate?”
I walk into the bathroom, black and white subway tile and a claw-foot tub with brass cross-handled faucets.
“Which would require having access to such a place and feeling confident what you’re doing wouldn’t be discovered.” I lead her down the path she’s already on.
“Isn’t it true that mummification in a closed structure that’s hot and dry could occur in as few as eleven days?” She lets me know what I’ve by now deduced is her theory. “What if the person installed a sauna in his basement? Couldn’t that work?”
“You mean the way Marino did?”
“Yes,” she says. “The way he did when he bought his house this past summer.”
“You mean the sauna he built from a kit that can fit one person sitting up on a bench not much wider than a toilet seat?”
The shower stall is the same tile, and bars of soap are dried out, and nothing looks recently used. I open the mirrored medicine cabinet door over the marble shell pedestal sink, the handles and fittings malachite and bronze.
“That rather horrible little sweatbox that looks like a Porta-John?” I ask.
She has more night guards, each from the same West Palm Beach dentist.
“A sauna that’s on a sixty-minute timer so one is constantly having to reset it?” I continue, and Burke is silent in the doorway.
I pick up prescription bottles, more muscle relaxers, Flexeril, Norflex, and the anti-inflammatory drugs Vioxx and Celebrex. She was taking the antidepressant nortriptyline, all of the medications prescribed by this dentist, Dr. Pulling, and consistent with treatments for the temporomandibular joint and muscle disorder known as TMJ.
She had a bad case of it. She would have suffered chronic pain. She was in a vortex of getting dental work done to relieve a wretched condition that can cause the jaw to lock or dislocate and the ears to ring and a constant ache that radiates down the neck and shoulders and debilitates.
“So I guess he dehydrated her slowly, running downstairs on the hour to reset the infrared heater, including last week, when he was out of town, in Florida?” I’m careful not to sound sarcastic. “And by the way, that kit he bought because he thought it would help him lose weight would mean the body was propped up in a sitting position.”
I walk out of the bedroom.
“She would have desiccated, dried out in that position.” I keep talking as I go down the stairs and Burke is behind me. “And if the body was straightened, such as by weights or floats pulling on it when it was tethered in the water? Tension at the joints and the skin’s going to split. She has no skin splitting, and her core body temperature was colder than the bay, which isn’t possible unless the body was refrigerated, possibly frozen.”
We are back in the entryway. I stop near the table with the glass bowl, where I’m sure Peggy Stanton never kept her car key, and Burke and I face each other, hooded and in white, with no pretenses or cordiality.
“He assaulted you five years ago in Charleston, South Carolina.” She fires the shot she’s saved. “He came to your house late at night and tried to rape you, and you never reported it to the police.”
There’s a note of triumph in her voice, and I’m sure I’m not imagining it.
“Why would you tell us anything now that might get him into trouble if you refused to do it then, after what he did?” she says.
“You don’t know the facts.” I hear footsteps on the front porch.
“I’m asking you for them.”
I don’t answer, because I won’t.
“Are you aware of what the statute of limitations for sexual assault is in South Carolina?”
“I’m not.”
“You haven’t exceeded it,” she says.
“It’s not relevant.”
“So you’re still protecting him.”
“You don’t have the facts,” I repeat.
“Here’s a fact. He used to be into treasure hunting. Yet something else you know about him,” Burke says, and it’s what she’s been waiting to do.
It’s why I’m here inside this house with you.
“And Peggy Stanton had Civil War buttons on her jacket. Did Marino bother to mention to you that he’d been tweeting a woman who collected antique buttons?”
“I’ve seen no evidence of an antique-button collection in this house,” I answer, with no emotion she can detect.
“You’re not going to talk to me about what he did to you.”
“I’m not.”
“Do you understand the problem I’m having? And it’s not as if I enjoy bringing this up. I’m sorry—” Douglas Burke starts to say, as the front door opens wide and rain blows in.
Benton is carrying something wrapped in a towel.
“If he’d really attempted to rape me, I can assure you he would have succeeded.” I don’t care who hears. “Pete Marino is a very big man, and at the time this occurred, he was armed. So if he’d intended to physically overpower me or put a gun to my head to make me do what he wanted, he could have. But he didn’t. He stopped what should never have started. But he stopped.”
Benton and Machado drip on the plastic-covered rug beneath the French chandelier, and the towel is dirty and wet, and I notice gray fur peeking out.
“A broken-out window with no screen,” Machado says, and what he just overheard seems etched in the air. “You know, near the ground, and the garage doesn’t have an alarm, maybe the cat somehow pushed it open and pushed out the screen. So I guess it’s been in and out of the garage all this time, made a bed in a box in there. Probably plenty to eat around here, or maybe people were feeding it.”
I take the cat from Benton, short-haired gray-and-white, with gold eyes and flat ears, a Scottish Fold that looks like an owl, the flea collar around its neck faded and old.
“No tag,” Benton says, and the look he gives Burke is piercing.