The Bone Bed

thirty-seven

VAL HAHN OF THE FBI’S CYBER SQUAD DESCRIBES SUMMER days in Grande Prairie as endless, with dawn coming early and darkness descending as late as ten p.m. due to the region’s northern latitude.

The night of August twenty-third,” she tells the image of General Briggs streaming live to us, “it was pouring rain and cold enough to see your breath. By the time Emma was returning to her trailer from the chow hall after having dinner with her colleagues, it was pitch dark in the campground.”

The mosquitoes were bad, and there were warnings about bears, she adds, and the paleontologists were reminded in an e-mailed memo not to let the wet miserable weather deter them from hauling garbage to the Dumpsters.

‘Hungry bears don’t care if they get wet,’ the e-mail read.” Hahn continues to set the scene for us. “And the night before, a bear had gotten into bags of trash left on a picnic table and had tried to break into a trailer. According to Emma’s colleagues, she was afraid of bears. She listened for any noise and looked for any movement, anything at all that might be a bear. She would not have approached her trailer or even continued walking toward it had she heard or noticed anything out of the ordinary.”

Obviously someone stealthy.” Douglas Burke says it as if she has a certain suspect in mind. “Stealthy as a ghost. Someone with the skill sets of a paid assassin.”

The campground and the weather that night,” Benton says, as if Burke said nothing. “Ideal for a violent offender who wants to be invisible and silent and completely unanticipated. One might expect a bear but not a human predator.”

Assuming he knows about the place.” Briggs has his glasses on again and is looking down at his desk. “It’s off the beaten track if you’re from out of town. Unless you’re into camping, seems to me.”

One has to assume he knew. Yes, sir, I agree,” Hahn replies. “When the paleontologists are subjected to the worst weather, they work and eat late. So did the perpetrator know that? I’m thinking he did. I’m thinking he had to be aware of their habits.”

She continues to give us a snapshot of Emma Shubert’s daily life when she spent her summers in Alberta’s Peace Region, a name that couldn’t seem more ironic now. During downpours or high winds, she and her colleagues typically would stay in the campground trailers, what those working the bone beds think of as temporary barracks, cramped, sparsely furnished, with electricity supplied by gasoline-powered generators. Early mornings the scientists would meet in the chow hall for breakfast, then cross a footbridge over Pipestone Creek and slog through woods and mud to the pachyrhinosaurus site.

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?”

More likely he had her in his own vehicle or whatever he’d rented,” Benton says. “A van, a camper, an RV that he could park in a remote area.”

We’re checking all rentals and purchases in a several-hundred-mile radius for the time frame in question,” Burke says to Briggs, who is barely listening. “From Class A’s like Airstreams to fifth-wheel travel trailers, in other words towables. Something he could pull up into the very campground where she was staying and it wouldn’t draw attention on a dark rainy night.”

It would solve a lot of problems for him if she’s unconscious,” Benton says to me. “Without the messiness of having to hit her in the head or attempt to force her at gunpoint. No guarantees, and things can go south in a hurry. Far preferable to knock her out with a chemical and get her inside his vehicle and drive away to do whatever he does, to act out whatever his fantasy might be.”

Which seems to include cutting off her ear,” Burke states. “Demonstrating a decompensation, a deteriorating self-control, a compulsion that’s gaining in force like a hurricane. If Emma’s the most recent victim, he’s into mutilation, becoming more violent. It’s taking more to relieve what builds up inside him,” she says, and she’s the profiler now, and Benton doesn’t comment.

We’re not likely to know if an ear was cut off,” I reply. “All that’s left of the head is the skull. Unless there’s a cut mark to bone, we won’t be able to tell.”

It needs to be pointed out that Channing Lott has significant professional and philanthropic ties with this part of Canada.” Burke is talking faster and more aggressively. “Specifically, his worldwide shipping company transports petroleum and liquid petroleum gases that are carried by rail from Fort McMurray, the epicenter of Alberta’s booming oil fields, and on to various seaports.”

Benton is looking at her now, his face expressionless.

He’s made numerous trips to some of the oil refineries.” Burke has gotten louder. “And last year one of his subsidiaries made a sizable contribution to the dinosaur museum being built in Grande Prairie.”

Which subsidiary?” Hahn frowns, as if this is information Burke hasn’t shared.

One called Crystal Carbon-Two,” Burke says to Briggs.

He is looking down at something on his desk again, and I can always tell when he’s done with a conversation.

Green cleaning equipment used in food processing, in paint stripping, for cleaning printing presses and machinery used in the paper industry,” Burke says. “No harmful emissions or toxic chemicals. Solid carbon-dioxide blasting, which also is becoming an increasingly popular technique in oil refineries.”

Yesterday was a bad day for our Marines,” Briggs says, and Burke has no intention of being silenced.

She tells us that Channing Lott has been marketing his equipment in northwest Alberta, and flight plans filed with the FAA indicate he has flown his Gulfstream jet into Edmonton and Calgary half a dozen times in the past two years. Emma Shubert was a very outspoken environmentalist, and what she was excavating in the bone beds was going to end up in this very museum that he was helping to fund.

I’ve got several articles pulled up.” Hahn has started digging into what she’s just now being told. “Announcements about his donation, five million dollars last year. He was definitely in Grande Prairie.”

Briggs nods at someone we can’t see, gesturing that he’ll be right there.

Mr. and Mrs. Channing Lott attended a Dino Ball, were the guests of honor, were presented with a proclamation. An announcement was made about the gift from Crystal Carbon-Two.” Hahn reads as she scrolls through what she’s searching on her computer. “This was a year ago this past July.”

I’ve got a lot of cases, a hell of a bad day.” General Briggs has heard enough. “Another damn chopper, that Chinook that went down in eastern Afghanistan yesterday. The C-Seventeen carrying those twelve fallen heroes is on final, about to land. I’ve asked Dr. Lopez to call you as soon as he knows more, Kay,” Briggs says to me, and he stands up and the LCDs are filled with his teal-green scrub shirt. “So you can see what overlapping there is, if any.”

Then he’s gone, his webcam disabled.

What about personal effects? Clothing, jewelry, anything found with the body?” I ask Benton. “In addition to her clothing, the rain jacket? What about her phone?”

No phone,” he replies.

I don’t mention what Lucy has to say about Emma Shubert’s early-generation iPhone and bogus e-mail accounts and proxy servers.

I can’t figure out what the significance is,” Hahn says to Benton, and she knows.

Maybe Benton found a discreet way to suggest what Lucy discovered almost instantly and illegally, but Hahn has found out what she needs to know. She has the information that the video footage of Emma Shubert’s last jetboat ride was taken with her own iPhone. I suspect it was recorded by a colleague while the paleontologists were headed to the Wapiti bone bed on a rare sunny morning, a file innocently made and saved and then later looked at by a monster. He probably went through every file saved on her phone, the same phone he used to take a photograph of a severed ear, what we’re supposed to assume is her ear.

The same phone that e-mailed the video and the jpg to me.

He got what he wanted.” Douglas Burke pushes back her chair, and no one answers her. “He’s out, a free man, right?” She looks incensed. “Channing Lott benefited from what’s going on, and in fact is the only individual who has benefited from it.”

She gets up and walks to the closed conference room door. She looks angry enough to hurt someone.

He was in jail when Peggy Stanton vanished.” Benton calmly looks at her, and she defiantly stares back at him. “He was in jail when Emma Shubert disappeared. He certainly didn’t kill them or anyone while he was locked up in jail.”

Crimes elaborately staged so we’re thinking serial murders. Why?” Burke is saying this to Benton, as if Val Hahn and I aren’t here. “To cover, to obfuscate the ultimate goal, which is getting rid of his wife and getting away with it.”

He was locked up. That’s a fact,” Benton says.

So someone did his bidding,” Burke answers him. “Someone makes sure Peggy Stanton’s body shows up exactly when it did and is filmed and he gets acquitted. Genius, I have to say. Amazing what money can buy.”

This killer acts alone,” Benton says. “Elaborate, yes. But not so we’ll think serial murders. They are serial murders.”

You know what, Benton?” She opens the conference room door. “You’re not always right.”