Patricia Cornwell - The Bone Bed

It can be a monsoon, Hahn says, and the scientists are going to dig as long as they are physically able to access an excavation site, and they could always access the local one. Muddy and as slippery as hell, but it’s not a sheer riverbank or hillside that requires a long drive or jetboat ride and rock-climbing gear. They’re going to dig somewhere, going to scrape away sedimentary mud and chip away shale, unearthing what appears to the untrained eye to be nothing but rocks, in a part of the world where the months one can work outside are limited because it’s not possible once the ground freezes. Late fall, winter, and early spring, the paleontologists are in the labs. They teach, and like Emma Shubert, many of them return to where they’re from.

“According to interviews made available to us and other research I’ve done,” Hahn says, “on August twenty-third the paleontologists had been digging in a sea of mud at the Pipestone Creek site, a pachyrhinosaurus bone bed discovered twenty-something years ago, what’s believed to be a mass grave where hundreds of the dinosaurs drowned, were wiped out by some natural disaster. The rain made it impossible to access the hilly slope of the Wapiti site where Emma usually excavated. Even on a good day you need ropes to get up there, so in a downpour, forget it.”

“Which was where she wanted to be,” Benton says. “A relatively new site, one she’d staked out as her territory. The Pipestone Creek site has been around much longer, as Val has said.”

“It was picked over, or at least this was how Emma thought of it, based on interviews with her colleagues,” Hahn says, and Briggs is looking at something else, possibly e-mail.

“What’s important,” Benton adds, “is the weather dictated Emma’s routine. If she traveled by jetboat or car an hour each way to the Wapiti bone bed, then she didn’t typically stay in the campground. The trailers she and some of the other visiting paleontologists used were mainly for the convenience of staying near the Pipestone Creek bone bed if that’s where they were working, which was an easy walk from the campground. The Wapiti bone bed, where Emma made the important discovery of a pachyrhino tooth two days before she disappeared, is some twenty miles north of Grande Prairie. And often after she’d worked there Emma would stay in town, in a studio apartment she rented in College Park.”

“Meaning if it hadn’t rained,” Briggs comments, “she might have gone up the river to her usual site and stayed in town and maybe she’d still be alive.”

“If it hadn’t rained, she would have excavated her usual bone bed,” Benton confirms. “It might have saved her life, but it’s hard to say. Maybe impossible to say.”

“Sounds to me like she was being stalked.” Briggs is looking down at his desk again, and while I can’t see what’s on it, I know him.

He’s multitasking. If the FBI is willing to go over the details of their investigation, he’ll listen. He’ll listen to the most obscure minutiae as long as he’s taking care of whatever’s in front of him, which is always something.

“Watching her at any rate, yes,” Benton is saying. “Enough for the killer to know her routines, unless he was just damn lucky she happened to be staying in the pitch-black mud hole of a campground the night he decided to grab her.”

“It makes me wonder if it’s not someone local.” Briggs reaches for something.

“Or has been in and out of the area.” Burke has her own theory.

I can look at her and know she has something to prove, probably to prove to Benton, who wants her transferred to another field office, maybe one in Kentucky. I don’t know if he’s told her yet, but I suspect he has, based on her demeanor, stony and stubborn and seductive. I can feel her anger smoldering as she continues to flaunt her opinions and herself.

“Someone who knew the area,” she says, “and had reason to know details about Emma and that the paleontologists don’t work the Wapiti site in bad weather.”

“Sedimentary argillite,” Benton says to us and not her. “River clay. The aboriginal people made tobacco pipes out of it, and it cakes on shoes and clothing like cement. After digging at the bone bed the last day Emma was seen alive, no one had cleaned up, including her. They’d walked directly to the chow hall, and when she finally headed to her trailer she would have been extremely muddy, dressed for the weather, including a blue hooded rain jacket that appears to be the one the body has on.”

“At night,” Hahn tells us, “the campground is so dark people use flashlights if they’re walking around because you can’t see a thing unless the moon is full, which it certainly wasn’t that night. Just a soupy darkness described by her colleagues as noisy, like a shower going full blast.”

“It would have been very easy to park a vehicle nearby,” Benton says. “And grab her.”

“Especially if she were incapacitated first,” I point out.

“Unless we’re talking about a person she would go with willingly,” Briggs suggests, and it appears he’s reading and initialing reports.

“I doubt that was possible without her colleagues knowing,” Benton answers him. “Without her mentioning something to someone, and based on interviews that have been relayed to us, based on her e-mails, her voicemails, Emma was completely focused on her profession. She wasn’t seeing anyone romantically, had only professional associations while she was working in the bone beds or the lab. When she left the chow hall that night, she said she was tired. She was turning in and would see everybody in the morning and maybe they’d get lucky and the rain would ease up. She walked back through the campground alone.”

“Any tire tracks or footprints by her trailer?” Briggs asks.

“A sea of viscous mud flooded by deep puddles because of the rain,” Benton says.

“So the thought is the killer got her to open her trailer door?” Briggs sips from a mug, coffee, no doubt, and if no one else were here I’d tell him what I usually do.

He drinks coffee all day long and into the night and then complains about insomnia. During my six-month forensic radiologic pathology fellowship at Dover’s port mortuary, I managed to get him to switch to decaf in the afternoon and to take long walks and hot baths. Old bad habits die hard and new good ones don’t last, Kay ; he no doubt would say what he always says when I lecture him.

“The thought is he grabbed her before she got inside,” Benton speculates. “There’s no evidence she ever returned to her trailer, that she actually went inside it. No muddy boots were found, no wet clothing, and the door was ajar, as if she was unlocking it when someone came up behind her.”

“They ever find her keys, her flashlight?” Briggs is looking at us again.

Hahn answers that police found them in a muddy puddle at the bottom of the trailer’s aluminum steps, which adds to the suspicions she was unlocking the door when she was accosted.

“What we’re exploring toxicologically,” I then say to my commander-in-chief, “is the possibility of a volatile organic compound like chloroform being used. Possibly some inhalant that would quickly render the person unconscious so he can take his victims wherever he wants, for whatever purpose.”

“You’ll make sure our friends in Edmonton screen for that and anything else that’s in your differential.” Briggs looks past his camera, as if someone is in his doorway now.

“An important question,” Burke says, “is if he took Emma Shubert someplace first.”

“If he doesn’t live around there,” Briggs replies, and he’s distracted, “it seems like that would be risky. A motel or motor inn, and what if she struggled or screamed?”