Patricia Cornwell: The Bone Bed

“Look, it’s no secret I don’t have a good opinion of him. I mean, what the hell do we really know about him except he’s Anna’s nephew?” Marino then says, and I’m really not surprised this is what he’s been waiting to confront me with. “Me and Lucy are worried about motives that might not occur to you. We were trying to figure out a connection, and there is one, with his father.”

“A connection to what?”

“Maybe a connection to a lot of things. Including that e-mail sent from Logan. Including maybe the two of you having more going on between you than . . . I mean, it’s pretty obvious you’re under his spell. . . .”

“I wish you wouldn’t plant ideas like this with Lucy or anyone else.” I won’t let him finish such an accusation about my relationship with Luke.

“His father’s a big financial tycoon in Austria, right?”

“You really should be careful what you suggest to people.”

“You just saw Guenter at Anna’s funeral, right?” He won’t stop pushing.

Guenter Zenner is Anna’s only living sibling. I saw him briefly at her graveside service in Zentralfriedhof, a gaunt old man draped in a long, dark duster, leaning on a cane and immeasurably sad.

“Just so happens one of the things he’s into is oil trading,” Marino continues, as we crawl across the bridge, the low sun directly in our faces and as bright as the light from a burning lens.

“Lucy found this out?”

“What matters is it’s true,” he says. “And that pipeline from Alberta to Texas is a huge deal to oil traders. They’re counting on it, have huge investments and stand to make millions, maybe billions.”

“Do you have any idea how many oil traders there are in the world?” I remind him.

This had to come from Lucy, and I imagine her finding out about Marino staying at the CFC last night because at some point she looked for him. Maybe she went there to talk to him and discovered him drinking and napping on the AeroBed, I don’t know, and I reconstruct what happened after I received the anonymous e-mail at 6:30 p.m.

Benton and I spent some time discussing it before I called the Grande Prairie police and next was directed to an Investigator Glenn with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who has been working the Emma Shubert case since she disappeared in August. What struck me most was the hesitation I sensed and what it implied, and I mentioned something about it to Lucy when we discussed the e-mail over the phone.

Dr. Shubert was skilled in reconstructing dino skeletons, Investigator Glenn said to me, and he was intimating that anyone who knows how to make molds and anatomically exact casts of bones in a lab might be capable of other types of fabrications, including a severed ear.

“The pipeline’s really important to global oil prices,” Marino continues, spinning his web, a web he intends to ensnare Luke Zenner in.

“I’m sure it is,” I reply.

“A multitrillion-dollar business venture.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me.”

“So how do you know for a fact there’s no link?” He glances over at me as he drives.

“Please explain how Guenter Zenner’s trading in oil among many other commodities, I can only imagine, would have something to do with Emma Shubert disappearing and my getting the e-mail?” I put it bluntly.

“Maybe she disappeared because she wanted to. Maybe she’s in collusion with people who have big money. The picture of the ear, the video are sent to you so we assume she’s dead.”

“You’re basing this on nothing.”

“No matter what, you’ll stick up for him,” Marino says. “That’s what worries Lucy and me.”

“Did the two of you stay up all night trying to force these pieces to fit into some puzzle you’ve devised? You really do want me to get rid of him that badly?”

“All I’m asking is you try to be objective, Doc,” Marino says. “As hard as that is in this situation.”

“I always do my best to be objective,” I reply calmly. “I recommend the same to you, to everyone.”

“I know how close you were to Anna, and I really liked her, too. Back in our Richmond days she was one of the few people I was glad as hell you trusted and spent time with.”

As if Marino picks my friends for me.

“But her family’s got a shady past, and I hate to remind you of that fact,” he adds.

“The Zenner family home was occupied by Nazis during the war.” I know exactly what he’s getting at. “That doesn’t make Anna or her family, including Luke, shady .”

“Well, the blond hair, the blue eyes. He sure as hell fits the part.”

“Don’t say things like that, please.”

“When you look the other way you’re just as guilty as the sons of bitches that do it,” he says. “Nazis lived in the Zenners’ ritzy castle while thousands of people were being tortured and murdered right down the road, and Anna’s family didn’t do shit.”

“What should they have done?”

“I don’t know,” Marino says.

“A mother, a father, three young daughters, and a son?”

“I don’t know. But they should have done something.”

“Should have done what? It’s a miracle they weren’t murdered, too.”

“Maybe I’d rather be murdered than go along with it.”

“Being held hostage in your own home by soldiers who are raping your daughters, and God only knows what they did to the little boy, doesn’t exactly mean you’re going along with it.” I remember Anna telling me her terrible truths, the wind gusting fiercely and flinging dead branches and brittle brown vines across her backyard as I sat in a carved rocker and felt fear pressing me from all sides.

I could barely breathe as she told me about the schloss that had been in the family for centuries, near Linz, on the Danube River. Day in and out, clouds of death from the crematorium stained the horizon above the town of Mauthausen, where there was a deep crater in the earth, a granite quarry worked by thousands of prisoners. Jews, Spanish Republicans, Russians, homosexuals.

“You don’t know where Guenter Zenner got all his money,” I hear Marino say, as I look out at a bright morning and am dark inside, reminded of nights in Richmond at Anna’s house during one of the most harrowing periods of my life. “Fact is, Guenter was already rich before he went into banking. Him and Anna inherited a shitload of money from their father, who had Nazis living in the family castle. The Zenners got rich off Jewish money and granite quarries, one of them a concentration camp so close they could see the smoke rising from the ovens.”

“These are terrible accusations,” I say to him, as I stare out my window.

“What’s terrible is what Luke reminds you of,” Marino says. “A time you don’t need to be dwelling on now that things are good. Why the hell do you want a reminder of those old days when everything was fucked up and you were blaming yourself for Benton being dead or at least thinking he was, blaming yourself for everything, including Lucy? She doesn’t want it, either. She doesn’t want you getting all hung up again about her and how it’s somehow your fault.”

“I wasn’t thinking about such things,” I reply, but now I will, since he’s managed to remind me.

Lucy’s early days at the FBI’s Engineering Research Facility in Quantico have not been foremost on my mind for a very long time, but he has conjured up the Lucy from back then and the reminder isn’t a happy one. A troubled teenager whose computer skills were savant-esque, she almost single-handedly created the FBI’s Criminal Artificial Intelligence Network, CAIN, while falling in love with a psychopath who nearly destroyed all of us.

I got her that FBI internship , I remember saying bitterly to Anna as we sat in her living room close to the fire with the lights out because I’ve always found it easier to talk in the dark. I did. Me, her influential, powerful aunt.