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Back The Bone Bed Save as PDF
Chapters (48)
  1. also by patricia cornwell
  2. title page
  3. copyright
  4. dedication
  5. contents
  6. prologue
  7. one
  8. two
  9. three
  10. four
  11. five
  12. six
  13. seven
  14. eight
  15. nine
  16. ten
  17. eleven
  18. twelve
  19. thirteen
  20. fourteen
  21. fifteen
  22. sixteen
  23. seventeen
  24. eighteen
  25. nineteen
  26. twenty
  27. twenty-one
  28. twenty-two
  29. twenty-three
  30. twenty-four
  31. twenty-five
  32. twenty-six
  33. twenty-seven
  34. twenty-eight
  35. twenty-nine
  36. thirty
  37. thirty-one
  38. thirty-two
  39. thirty-three
  40. thirty-four
  41. thirty-five
  42. thirty-six
  43. thirty-seven
  44. thirty-eight
  45. thirty-nine
  46. forty
  47. two nights later
  48. credits

“To nothing. No slots left in the main panel. It looks like she had someone come in, maybe a handyman, maybe an electrician, but what was done is substandard. It appears she intended to install something that would need to be connected to a breaker.” Benton won’t look at Burke, practically has his back to her. “A new cable runs from the subpanel along the wall to a new outlet.”

“Work that’s recent; how recent?” Burke asks, and it’s Machado who answers, but he doesn’t answer her.

He explains to me that there is a work area in the basement, a large table with paintbrushes, cookie cutters, wooden utensils, and a rolling pin.

“Like she was going to do baking down there,” she says, and he describes a portable sink on casters, and I don’t know what he means.

“A portable sink?” I puzzle. “Connected to a faucet? Why would she bake in the basement? Why not use her kitchen?”

“More like a plastic basin on a stand with wheels. I can show you if you want,” Machado says.

“Yes, before I take all this off.” I mean the protective clothing. “She doesn’t seem to mind my holding her, so I don’t think she’ll mind if we look. There’s a basement door that leads outside?”

“What the firefighters came in.”

“We can go down and then out from there.”

“The sink or basin looks pretty new, right there in the area where the new outlet is.” He puts on clean boot covers. “Lots of pieces of cut wire scattered around. Black, white, green, number-six wire like you’d hook up to a pole circuit, to the neutral and ground bars,” he explains. “But whatever she planned to hook up, she didn’t get around to it. I’m thinking maybe she was going to put in an oven, but I agree it’s a strange place to bake cookies or whatever. We need to find who did that electrical work.”

twenty-six

twenty-six

THE RAIN HAS STOPPED, THE NIGHT COLD AND FLOODED, as I drive home alone, just the cat with me.

Benton asked Burke to give him a lift to the CFC so he could get his car, but I don’t believe that’s the real reason. They will have words. He will let her know what he thinks of her being on pseudoephedrine, on speed, and laying into me aggressively, and the hell with her allergies. What she did was out of line. I don’t give a damn about the reason, and neither will he, and he’s enraged by what he overheard, and he should be.