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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

“Yes, that we all knew about Mrs. Lott,” Al Galbraith says. “Considering the position she had in life, she was keenly aware of the risks. I don’t want to use the word paranoid.”

“Kidnapping for ransom,” Lott says to me. “Which was her first thought about what happened to our dog.”

“That someone grabbed Jasmine and soon enough would demand ransom,” Shelly Duke, his chief financial officer, says. “Kidnapping is a billion-dollar industry, and it’s a depressing reality that certain individuals, particularly those who travel internationally, should have appropriate insurance coverage. Millie asked me on a number of occasions if one could get the same insurance for Jasmine.”

“She worried someone might pull a boat up to our dock in the middle of the night.” Lott has a way of talking over people without interrupting them. “After those Somali pirates abducted that British couple from their yacht? Well, that was upsetting enough to Millie, and then when bandits murdered a tourist and kidnapped his wife from that luxury resort in Kenya, she became quite concerned. Obsessively concerned. Our property is fenced in and gated, but she worried about vulnerability from the deep-water dock, was sufficiently worried to ask me to get rid of it, which I certainly didn’t want to do, as on occasion I moor the Cipriano there.”

“Your yacht?” I ask, because I can’t help it.

If he in fact is charged with some other crime, I’ve just ensured I will be a witness, possibly for the defense again.

“Was your yacht docked there the night she vanished?” I then ask, because I don’t care about Jill Donoghue.

I care about the truth.

“It wasn’t,” he answers. “It was spending the winter in Saint-Tropez. I usually don’t have it brought back to this area until May.”

I open the door adjoining my office to Bryce’s and give him the envelope, telling him to e-mail copies of the security video to Lucy and me. I let him know that he can show our guests out, and Channing Lott gives me a card, engraved on creamy paper of heavy stock. He’s written his private telephone numbers on it.

“Millie wouldn’t go with anyone, even if a gun was pointed at her head.” He pauses in the corridor, his eyes intensely locked on mine. “If someone tried to grab her in our backyard, she would have fought like hell. He’d have to shoot her on the spot right then and there.”

thirty-five

thirty-five

TOXICOLOGY IN PEGGY STANTON’S CASE IS LIKE SEARCHING for a needle in a haystack when the needle may not be a needle and the hay may not be hay. I can’t grab at straws and wildly guess. I can’t demand every special drug screen imaginable without running out of samples and Phillis Jobe running out of patience.