The Bone Bed

two

THE SEVERED HUMAN EAR IS WELL DEFINED AND DELICATE, the curved cartilage devoid of hair.

A right ear. Possibly white. Fair-skinned is as definitive as I can get. Possibly a woman’s ear, for sure not an adult male’s or a young child’s ear, but I can’t rule out an older girl or boy.

The lobe is pierced once directly in the center, the bloodstained section of newspaper the ear was photographed on easily identifiable as the Grande Prairie Daily Herald-Tribune, which would have been Emma Shubert’s local paper while she was working in northwest Canada’s Peace Region this past summer. I can’t see a date, just a portion of a story about mountain pine beetles destroying trees.

What do you want from me?

I’m affiliated with the Department of Defense, specifically with the Armed Forces Medical Examiners, or AFME, and while this expands my jurisdiction to the federal level, that certainly doesn’t include Canada. If Emma Shubert has been murdered, she won’t be my case, not unless her dead body ends up thousands of miles southeast of where she disappeared and turns up in this area.

Who sent this to me, and what is it supposed to make me think or do? Maybe what I’ve already done since six-thirty last night.

Alert law enforcement and worry and feel angry and rather useless.

A biometric lock clicks free at the forensic computer lab next door. Not Toby or some other investigator but my niece, Lucy, I realize, and I’m surprised and pleased. I thought she wasn’t coming in today. Last I heard she was heading out in her helicopter, maybe to New York, but I’m not sure. She’s been very busy of late, setting up her country home, as she calls the big spread she purchased northwest of here in Lincoln. She’s been back and forth to Texas getting certified in the new twin-engine helicopter that recently was delivered. Busy with preoccupations I can’t help her with, she says, and my niece has secrets. She always has, and I can always tell.

That U? I text her. Coffee?

Then she is in my open doorway, slender and remarkably fit in a snug black T-shirt, black silk cargo pants, and black leather trainers, the veins standing out in her strong forearms and wrists, her rose-gold highlighted hair still damp from the shower. She looks as if she’s already been to the gym and is headed to a rendezvous with someone I don’t know about, and it’s not even seven o’clock in the morning.

Good morning.” I’m reminded of how nice it is to have her around. “I thought you were flying.”

You’re here early.”

I have a backlog of histology I need to put a dent in but probably won’t,” I reply. “And I’ve got court this afternoon, the Mildred Lott case, or maybe I should call it the Mildred Lott spectacle. Forcing me to testify is nothing more than a stunt.”

It could be more than that.” Lucy’s pretty face is intensely preoccupied.

Yes, it could be embarrassing. In fact, I fully expect it will be.” I watch her curiously.

Make sure Marino or someone goes with you.” She has stopped midway on the gunmetal-gray carpet and is looking up at the geodesic glass dome.

I guess it’s you I’ve heard wandering around for the past hour,” I continue to probe. “I was getting a little worried we might have an intruder.” It’s my way of asking what’s going on with her.

It wasn’t me,” she says. “I just got here, stopped by to check on something.”

I don’t know who else is in, who’s on call,” I add. “So if it wasn’t you I heard? Well, I’m not sure why anyone on call would be wandering around on this floor.”

Marino, that’s who. At least this time. I’m surprised you didn’t notice his gas guzzler in the lot.”

I don’t mention that she’s one to talk. My niece won’t drive anything with less than five hundred horsepower, usually a V12, preferably Italian, although her most recent acquisition is British, I think, but I could be wrong. Supercars aren’t my area of expertise, and I don’t have her money and wouldn’t spend it on Ferraris and flying machines even if I did.

What’s he doing here this early?” I puzzle.

He decided to be on call last night and sent Toby home.”

What do you mean he decided to be on call? He just got back from Florida last night. Why would he decide to be on call? He’s never on call.” It makes no sense.

It’s just a good thing no big cases came in that required someone to go to the scene because I’m guessing Marino slept. Or maybe he was tweeting,” she says. “Which isn’t a good idea. Not after hours, when he tends to be a little less inhibited.”

I’m confused.”

Did he tell you he’s moved an inflatable AeroBed into Investigations?” she says.

We don’t allow beds. We don’t allow people on call to sleep. Since when is he on call?” I repeat.

Since he’s been having fights with what’s-her-name.”

Who?”

Or he’s ornamenting and doesn’t want to drive.”

I have no idea what Lucy is talking about.

Which is rather often these days.” She looks me in the eye. “What’s-her-name he met on Twitter and had to unfollow in more ways than one. She made a real fool of him.”

‘Ornamenting’?”

Minis he turns into ornaments. After he drinks what was in them. You didn’t hear it from me.”

I think back to July eleventh, Marino’s birthday, which has never been a happy occasion for him and is only worse the older he gets.

You need to ask him yourself, Aunt Kay,” Lucy adds, as I recall visiting him at his new house in West Cambridge.

Wood-sided on a sliver of a lot, it has working fireplaces and genuine hardwood floors, he likes to boast, and a finished basement, where he installed a sauna, a workshop, and a speed bag he loves to show off. When I drove up with a birthday basket of homemade asparagus quiche and white chocolate sweet salami, he was on a ladder, stringing strands of lighted small glass skulls along the roofline, Crystal Head vodka minis he was ordering directly from the distillery and turning into ornaments, he volunteered before I could ask, as if to imply he’d been buying empties, hundreds of them. Getting ready for Halloween, he added boisterously, and I should have known then that he was drinking again.

I don’t remember what you’re doing today except maybe another pig farm somewhere that you intend to put out of business,” I say to Lucy, as I push away every horrible thing Marino’s ever done when he’s been drunk.

Southwest Pennsylvania.” She continues looking around my office as if something has changed that she should know about.

Nothing has. Not that I can think of. The juniper bonsai on my brushed-steel conference table is a new addition, but that’s all. The photographs, certificates, and degrees she’s glancing over are the same, as are the orchids, gardenias, and sago palm. My black-laminate-surface bow-shaped desk she is staring at hasn’t changed. Nor has the matching hutch or the black granite countertop behind my chair, where she’s now wandering.

Not so long ago I did get rid of the microdissection system, replacing it with a ScanScope that allows me to view microscopic slides, and I watch Lucy check the monitor, powering it off and on. She picks up the keyboard and turns it over, then moves on to my faithful Leica microscope, which I’ll never give up because there isn’t anything I trust more than my own eyes.

Pigs and chickens in Washington County, more of the same,” she says, as she continues walking around, staring, touching things, picking them up.

Farmers pay the fines and then start in again,” she adds. “You should fly with me sometime and get an eyeful of sow stalls, piggeries that cram them in like sardines. People who are awful to animals, including dogs.”

A whoosh sounds, a text message on her iPhone, and she reads it.

Plumes of runoff going into streams and rivers.” She types a reply with her thumbs, smiling as if whoever sent the message is someone she’s fond of or finds amusing. “Hopefully we’ll catch the a*sholes in flagrante delicto, shut them.”

I hope you’re careful.” I’m not at all thrilled with her newfound environmentalist vigilantism. “You start messing with people’s livelihoods and it can get mean.”

Like it did for her?” She indicates my computer and what I’ve been watching on it.

I have no idea,” I confess.

Whose livelihood was Emma Shubert messing with?”

All I know is she found a tooth two days before she disappeared,” I reply. “Apparently it’s the first one unearthed in a bone bed that’s a rather recent discovery. She and other scientists had just started digging there a few summers ago.”

A bone bed that may end up the most productive one anywhere,” Lucy says. “A burial ground for a herd of dinosaurs that died all at once, really unusual, maybe unprecedented. It’s an incredible opportunity to piece together entire skeletons and fill a museum, attract tourists and dino devotees and outdoors lovers from all over the world. Unless the area is so polluted nobody comes.”

One can’t read about Grande Prairie and not be aware of the economic importance of its natural gas and oil production.

Seventeen hundred miles of pipeline carrying synthetic crude from the tar sands of Alberta to refineries in the Midwest and all the way to the Gulf of Mexico,” Lucy says, disappearing inside my bathroom, where there are a Keurig and macchinetta on the counter by the sink. “Pollution, global warming, total ruination.”

Try the Illy MonoDose. The silver box,” I call out to her. “And make mine a double shot.”

I believe this is a café Cubano kind of morning.”

The demerara sugar is in the cabinet,” I let her know, as I finish my last sip of cold coffee and select play again.

What is it I’ve missed? Something.

I can’t shake the gut feeling, and I focus again on the overexposed figure whose features are blown out by the glaring sun. The person doesn’t appear to be very large, could be either a woman or a small man or possibly an older child wearing a sun cap with a veil around the sides and a wide brim that he or she appears to be holding with two fingers of the right hand, perhaps to keep the cap from blowing off. But again, I can’t be certain.

I can’t make out a single feature of the darkly shadowed face or what the person is wearing except for a long-sleeved jacket or baggy shirt and the sun cap, and there is a barely noticeable glint near the right temporal area that suggests glasses, possibly sunglasses. But I can’t be sure of anything. I don’t know much more now than I did when the attachment was e-mailed to me some twelve hours ago.

I’ve heard nothing further from the FBI, but Benton’s arranged a meeting for later today, assuming I’m out of court in time,” I say, above the macchinetta’s steamy blasts. “More of an informal discussion, since nothing’s happened yet beyond the film clip being sent to me.”

Something’s happened.” Lucy’s voice sounds from inside the bathroom. “Someone’s ear has been cut off. Unless it’s fake.”