The Bone Bed

by Patricia Cornwell

  “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.”

  thirty-eight

  I WANT PASTA OR PIZZA AND HAVE ASKED BENTON TO stop on his way home, which won’t be anytime soon, he warned me, when we were leaving the CFC separately.

  Both of us alone. Prepossessed and preoccupied. Off to where we need to go, and that is the sum of us individually and together. I know full well when something isn’t important to anyone but me.

  “Food,” I told my husband, as I was driving alone out of my parking lot. “God, I’m hungry. I’m starved,” I said on my way to handle what no one else can be bothered with, and I check my rearview mirror again and the dark blue Ford LTD is right behind me.

  I follow the Charles River as it bends and snakes, curving like the corridors in my building, taking me where I’ve begun and ended, where I’ve been and will go, past the DeWolfe Boathouse again, past the Morse School playground again, heading in the direction of Howard Roth’s neighborhood again, on my way to Fayth House. The dark blue Ford is on my bumper, and I see the face with dark glasses in my rearview mirror.

  Watching me, daring me. Brazenly following me.

  “Food and wine,” I told Benton over the phone a little while ago, when I didn’t know this would happen, and I’m shocked.

  I’m incensed and disbelieving, and at the same time not sure why I’m surprised.

  “We will eat together, be together, all of us,” I said, alone and hungry and beginning to feel worn down by it all, a single question burning on the dark horizon of my dark thoughts.

  I watch the car behind me, my heart turning hard like something vital dying and petrifying into my own bone bed of emotion. Now you’ve gone too far, I think. You’ve really gone too far, and I imagine dinner with Lucy, Benton, Marino. I’m hungry and angry and want to be with people I care about, and I’ve had enough, because it’s too much now. I turn right on River Street, and Douglas Burke turns, too, her dark glasses staring.

  I pull into the parking lot of the Rite Aid at the intersection of Blackstone and River Streets, letting her know I’m aware that she’s been on my tail for the past ten minutes and I’m not going to be harassed by her and I’m not afraid of her, either. I roll down the window of my SUV, and we are driver’s door to driver’s door like two cops, like comrades, which we’re certainly not.

  We’re enemies, and she’s openly letting me know it.

  “What is it, Douglas?” I’ve never been able to call her Doug or Dougie.

  It’s all I can do to call her anything.

  “I wasn’t going to say this in front of them.” Her glasses are dark green or black, and the sun is low, the old low buildings of Cambridge casting long shadows, a low late-afternoon well on its way to the lowest time of the year around here, a New England brutal winter.

  “Out of professional respect, I didn’t bring it up with them in the room,” she says.

  “In front of them?” I ask, and she has no professional respect for anyone, least of all for me.

  Her dark glasses stare.

  “You mean in front of Benton,” I assume.

  “I know about your niece.” She pushes those words out like animals shoved, herded, moved with aggression.

  I don’t answer her.

  “Exploiting vulnerabilities in websites, harvesting information.” She talks snidely, as if she’s convinced she knows how to hurt me. “I love the way hackers describe what they do. Which in your niece’s case is nothing short of a brute-force attack on whatever server she’s interested in for the express purpose of obstructing justice.”

  “‘A brute-force attack’? I wonder who’s really doing that.” I look at her.

  She points two fingers at her dark masked eyes and then points at me.

  “I’m watching,” she says dramatically. “Tell Lucy she’s not so damn smart after all, and you’re a co-conspirator to go along with her stunts, and for what? So she can find out something five minutes before we do? Before the FBI does? Because she’s jealous.”

  “Lucy’s not the sort to get jealous.” I sound perfectly reasonable. “But I think you might be.”

  “I’m sure it must be awful to be fired by the very thing you’re constantly surrounded by.”

  “Yes, that must be awful,” I say pointedly, because Douglas Burke is constantly surrounded by Benton and reminders of him, and she’s fired.

  She’s fired as his partner and he wants her transferred to some distant place, and he may be suggesting more than that behind the scenes. Special Agent Douglas Burke isn’t fit to serve. She shouldn’t be carrying a gun or arresting anyone, and I advise her as diplomatically as I possibly can that it might not be wise for her to engage Lucy. It would not be prudent to simply show up on my niece’s property or to drop by unannounced or to follow her the way she’s just followed me.

  “You know her history, so I think you understand what I mean,” I say to Burke, who likely is aware of every firearm Lucy owns, every handgun and large-capacity weapon she has registered in Massachusetts and she has a license to carry.

  “Are you threatening me?” She smiles, and that is when I am certain that she is profoundly unstable and unwell and possibly violent.

  “It’s not my style to threaten people,” I tell her, and now I’m very concerned.

  “I’m not afraid to solve this case, you know,” she then says. “Unlike others, it seems. I’m not afraid, and I can’t be bribed.”

  I’m concerned about her, about her safety. I’m concerned about other people, too.

  “I’m not intimidated or influenced by someone’s political connections or money,” she says, “not in bed with federal judges and U.S. attorneys, not stupid enough to believe that someone in jail doesn’t have people on the outside doing his bidding. A small price to pay. Locked up half a year in exchange for getting rid of the wife you’ve grown to hate.”

  “And you know that. You know he hated her? Where did you get that?” I stop myself from arguing with someone who can’t possibly be logical.

  “I just want to know why you’re protecting him. It’s obvious why you’d protect your niece, but why Channing Lott?”

  “You need to stop this,” I reply, because she is beyond being reasoned with.

  “What has he promised you?”

  “You need to stop this before it goes any further.”

  “He came to see you,” she says. “Now, isn’t that just perfect. What else did he say to you, Kay? The missing dog? How scared his wife was and on and on, pleading his case with you while your niece is crashing through firewalls and you’re trying to run me out of town, trying to ruin me? And you think you can?”

  “I don’t want you to ruin yourself.”

  I warn her she’s going to have a serious problem if she continues to follow me, continues to make inflammatory and accusatory statements, that I’m the one feeling threatened.

  “You need to go back to your field office,” I say to her, because I have a strong feeling about what she intends to do, and I remember every word Benton said about her and the way she used to act around Lucy, and at the same time I know better.

  It isn’t just pseudoephedrine, whatever drugs she’s on. It’s what Douglas Burke has to prove, and she’s not going to listen because she can’t.

  “He’s so much better off with me.” She means Benton is.

  The ultimate case Douglas Burke must solve in her life isn’t a bank robbery or serial murders
but the crime of her own existence. I don’t know what happened to her, probably when she was a child. I also don’t care.

  “He knows it, too,” she says to me, through the open window of her Bureau car. “It’s a shame you don’t want what’s best for him. Trying to sabotage me isn’t going to help your pathetic excuse for a marriage, Kay.”

  “Go back to your office and talk to someone.” I am careful not to sound provocative. “Tell someone what you just told me, share the information, maybe with your SAC, with Jim.” I say it clinically, dispassionately, almost kindly. “You need to talk to someone.”

  She needs help, and she’s not going to get it, and I have a strong feeling about what she’s going to do, and when I drive away toward mid-Cambridge, I let Benton know.

  “I think she intends to confront Channing Lott.” I leave him a voicemail because he’s not answering his phone. “She’s over the edge, and someone needs to intervene. Someone needs to stop her immediately to protect her from herself.”

  I pull into a Starbucks to get a coffee, a double shot, black, as if that will help me collect my thoughts, as if caffeine will calm me, and I sit in my car for a few minutes and try Benton again. Next I text him, making sure he somehow gets the message that he needs to intervene without delay before Douglas Burke does something foolish, dangerous, possibly irreparable. She’s unstable and obsessed and armed. I drop my unfinished coffee in the trash and drive off, wondering if I should warn Lucy and decide against it. I’m not sure what she might do.

  It is dark, the sun below a blackened horizon when I reach Fayth House, a brick complex, tidy and relatively modern, with deliberately placed flowerbeds and trees. A silver SUV is pulling out as I turn in, leaving very few cars in the parking lot, and I suspect most of the residents in the retirement community don’t drive. I walk inside a pleasant lobby with blue carpet and blue furniture and silk flowers, and Americana prints and posters on the walls that remind me of Peggy Stanton’s checks.

  The receptionist is a stout woman with frizzy brown hair and thick glasses, and I ask her who’s in charge.