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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

“I’m glad you feel that way.” I toss the crust and place it in an oiled, floured pan, and I know Lucy is talking about herself and what’s going on in her life. “I just don’t understand why you felt you couldn’t tell me. Maybe you could get the onions and mushrooms out of refrigerator one; we’re going to need to sauté them and drain them. To get all the water out.”

“I was afraid to jinx it,” she says. “I needed to see if it could work, and most times it doesn’t work if you try to go back to someone you used to be with.” She finds a cutting board and a knife. “I know you feel you should be told absolutely everything, but I have to be alone in my life, to feel what I feel by myself sometimes.”

“I certainly don’t feel I should be told everything.” I place a third crust in a pan. “If I really felt that way, I wouldn’t have much of a marriage.”

I haven’t seen Benton since yesterday, when he was with me at my office. I took care of Douglas Burke because I didn’t think anyone else should, and Benton didn’t look on directly, but he was in the autopsy room the entire time. Mainly he wanted to know if she struggled, if she made any attempt at all to defend herself. Burke was armed with a nine-millimeter pistol, and Benton didn’t understand what could have happened, why she didn’t fight.

All she did was shoot the damn door and shoot it badly, he said repeatedly.

Based on the dents and holes in the door and door frame, she was aiming for the lock.

Why the hell didn’t she shoot him? Benton must have asked that a dozen times, and I’ve continued to explain what seems obvious to everyone else.

Burke was so hung up on Channing Lott, she was so convicted in her own beliefs, that she didn’t know who stood before her. She didn’t realize who the killer was until he led her into that windowless room, what Al Galbraith had turned into a death chamber, an empty storage area with walk-in deadbolted freezers and a port in a brick wall fixed with a nozzle. The dry-ice blaster was on the other side of that wall, and that’s where Galbraith would turn it on, a heavy-duty aggressive machine with a hopper that could hold enough dry-ice pellets to blast frozen CO2 for hours.