The Bone Bed

thirty-six

IT IS ALMOST FOUR P.M. WHEN I WALK INTO THE WAR room, as it’s called, where experts and investigators, including scientists and doctors from the military, convene face-to-face both in person and remotely. Here behind closed doors we wage battle against the enemy using high-definition video and CD-quality audio, and I recognize who is speaking.

I hear General John Briggs’s deep commanding voice saying something about transport on an Air Force plane in Washington state. A C-130, he says, and he’s talking about someone I know.

He just took off from McChord, will land in about an hour.” The chief of the Armed Forces Medical Examiners, my boss, fills integrated LCDs around the geometrically shaped computer conference table.

He won’t supervise, of course. He’ll be there to observe,” Briggs says, and displayed on the deep blue acoustical upholstered walls are scene photographs that are unfamiliar to me, a skull, scattered bones, and human hair.

I take a chair next to Benton and across from Val Hahn, who is in a khaki suit and a serious mood, and she nods at me. Next to her is Douglas Burke, in black, and she doesn’t give me so much as a glance. Turning on the HD display in front of me, I look at Briggs’s rugged face on my monitor as he explains what the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Edmonton, Alberta, is doing as a courtesy because we don’t have jurisdiction.

We could argue it, but we won’t.” Briggs has a way of assuming authority and making people believe it. “We’re not going to have a pissing match in a case where it’s an ally capable of conducting a competent forensic investigation. This isn’t Jonestown or American missionaries murdered in Sudan. It will be a fully coordinated effort with our Canadian friends.”

I can tell from the military coin and memorial flag displays on the shelves behind him that he’s sitting at his desk inside his port mortuary office at Dover Air Force Base. He’s in scrubs because his work isn’t done, a planeload of flag-draped transfer cases scheduled to arrive by the end of the day, I know from the news. A chopper shot down. Another one.

His role is to observe, to be a conduit between them and us,” Briggs is saying, about the AFME’s consulting forensic pathologist in Seattle.

I’m sorry I’m late.” I speak to my monitor, and Briggs is looking at me and he’s looking at everyone.

Let me fill you in, Kay.” He informs me that Emma Shubert is dead.

Her decomposing remains have been found not even five miles from the Pipestone Creek campground where she was last seen by her colleagues on the night of August 23. Dr. Ramon Lopez is being flown to Edmonton, and the AFME consultant, the retired chief of Seattle, a friend of mine, will be in touch with me as soon as he has information.

Some kids looking for dinosaur bones.” Briggs describes for me what he’s already explained to everyone else. “Apparently, they were exploring a wooded area off Highway Forty-three and noticed several small bones. They thought at first they’d discovered another bone bed, and they had, in a sense. Only these bones weren’t petrified or old. Small human bones of the hands and feet, most likely scattered by animals. Then a human skull near a pile of rocks accompanied by a foul odor.”

When was this?” I again apologize for what he has to repeat.

Yesterday late afternoon. Most of the body was under rocks that someone obviously piled on top. So she’s not completely skeletonized, as you can see.”

Briggs clicks through an array of photos that are large and graphic on the wall-mounted flat screens. Small human bones, carpals, metacarpals, and phalanges, what look like white and gray stones in a dry creek bed overwhelmed by trees, and a skull wedged under a shrub as if it rolled there or perhaps an animal nudged it.

A pelt of matted grayish-brown hair at the edge of piled rocks, and then the shallow grave is exposed, revealing the remains in situ, a body in a blue coat and gray pants curled up on its side. Areas not protected by clothing, the head, the hands, the feet, likely were preyed on and gnawed on by insects and wildlife, and were disarticulated and scattered.

What about boots or shoes?” I inquire.

Not on the clothing inventory I’ve received.” Briggs types on a keyboard I can’t see and puts on his glasses. “One blue rain jacket, one pair of gray pants, a bra, a pair of panties, a silver metal watch on a blue Velcro band that believe it or not is still ticking.”

No shoes or socks,” I comment. “Interesting, because at some point before she died, Peggy Stanton was barefoot.”

Psychological hobbling,” Benton says, and I wonder how long he’s known. “Rendering the victim submissive and dominated.”

And also making it harder to run,” Douglas Burke says to him and no one else.

Her wide-eyed stare brings to mind a wild animal, a rabid one.

It was a cool and rainy summer in northwest Alberta.” The most powerful forensic pathologist in the United States resumes briefing me. “And of course it’s been quite cold during the month of October. So two months out and most of the body is reasonably intact because of temperatures that almost mimic refrigerated conditions, and also clothing and rocks protected it somewhat. If she’s a stabbing, a shooting, blunt force, possibly even strangulation, there may be enough soft tissue for us to tell. ID by dental charts has been confirmed, and we’re awaiting DNA, but there doesn’t seem to be a doubt it’s her.”

Any apparent injuries?” I ask.

Not that I’m aware of,” he says. “We know she wasn’t shot in the head. No skull fractures.” He’s looking at a computer on his desk, obviously scrolling through an electronic file. “No projectiles, no fractures on x-ray. They haven’t autopsied her yet, are waiting for Dr. Lopez.”

The Canadian authorities understand we believe she’s not an isolated case,” Benton says to me, and when we were on the elevator earlier and I mentioned that Emma Shubert is dead, he knew it was true.

He knew it for a fact. It was he who instigated this meeting.

They understand she’s linked to at least one homicide here, possibly two, possibly more,” Benton fills me in, and I have no doubt the Grande Prairie detectives and Royal Canadian Mounted Police working Emma Shubert’s disappearance would have contacted the FBI the instant they realized the remains were hers.

She was an American citizen. A disturbing jpg image and video file possibly relating to her were anonymously e-mailed to me two days ago, and the local police and RCMP are aware of that. I suspect Benton was notified and got in touch with General Briggs, who contacted the OCME in Edmonton and also Dr. Lopez. The AFME would want to know about the Emma Shubert case because ultimately the Department of Defense would want to know. If my office is in the middle of a serial murder investigation that is federal jurisdiction and linked to a homicide in Canada, General John Briggs has to be informed. He will demand every detail and constant updates.

The timing. Am I the only one who finds the timing as in-our-face as a billboard?” Burke says, and her eyes are glassy.

Pseudoephedrine, or she’s excited by something far more dangerous, dressed in a suit with a very short skirt and a red scoop-neck sweater that’s so tight it seems airbrushed on. Directly across from Benton, she arranges herself in such a way as to give him an eyeful and give me one, too, and possibly Briggs, depending on the angle of her camera and what is displayed on his desktop screen.

Both bodies are found on the same day?” She is emphatic with Briggs, almost argumentative. “Peggy Stanton’s body turns up here in the Massachusetts Bay the same day Emma Shubert turns up in Canada? Isn’t that a little too coincidental, John?”

Exactly that, a coincidence,” Briggs states, in his calm, unflappable way, and her feminine attributes wouldn’t be lost on him as much as they would be completely dismissed. “It stands to reason whoever piled rocks on top of her out in the middle of the woods had no control over the timing of when kids searching for fossils, for dino bones, would happen upon it.”

It’s different,” Benton says, but he’s not saying it to Burke. “The killer wanted Peggy Stanton’s body found when it was and intended to shock whoever attempted to recover it from the bay, possibly intended exactly what he got, which was the thrill of a highly publicized spectacle. His handiwork was all over the news. In contrast, when he murdered Emma Shubert he did not intend to shock whoever found her remains, because he didn’t intend for them to be found at all. He carried or dragged her body probably from the highway and into the woods and covered it with rocks.”

It’s at this point I mention Mildred Lott. I describe the parallel of missing pets that later turn up, and her fear of being kidnapped and her husband’s assertion that it would be extremely difficult for someone to pull that off. She would rather be shot on the spot than comply with an attacker, according to him, and those who knew her found her condescending and overbearing, I explain.

She didn’t treat all people kindly or fairly, and Peggy Stanton seemed to have withdrawn into the confined space of her own private grieving, not venturing out much unless it was to perform acts of charity. Emma Shubert had a singular focus, impassioned by hard, cold remnants of a prehistoric past, with very little evidence she connected with anyone.

All three of these women are unlikely candidates for abduction and murder,” I suggest. “They were going about their business, on their own property, or carrying out their usual routines when they vanished. They were formidable and not necessarily accessible or sociable, and they weren’t quick to trust. In fact, I get the impression they weren’t trusting at all.”

You’re pretty certain it’s one perpetrator, Kay,” Briggs doesn’t ask but states.

I think that’s what we’re going to discover and need to keep in mind.”

It’s one person,” Benton agrees. “And Emma Shubert was a victim of opportunity. I don’t think he planned her well in advance, or at least that what happened to her was premeditated to the degree the other two were. I suspect he was out of his normal habitat, was in the Grande Prairie area for a reason.”

Something that ties him to northwest Alberta and also to Cambridge,” Burke asserts, as if she’s answering a question that’s not been asked.

Maybe they met. Maybe they didn’t. But they encountered each other somehow,” Benton tells Briggs as if it’s fact, because there’s no other way it could have happened.

Emma Shubert came to the killer’s attention, became a target, and she probably had no awareness of it. He may have stalked her, followed her, and likely was waiting for her in the remote wooded campground where she was last seen alive.

There’s no lighting. Just the ambient glow of small trailers widely spaced in the woods,” Benton says. “And it was solid overcast and raining that night.”