The Bone Bed

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
    Publishers Since 1838
    Published by the Penguin Group
    Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
    Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
    Copyright © 2012 by Cornwell Entertainment, Inc.
    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
    Published simultaneously in Canada
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
    Cornwell, Patricia Daniels.
    The bone bed / Patricia Cornwell.
    p. cm.
    ISBN 978-1-101-60663-6
    1. Scarpetta, Kay (Fictitious character). 2. Murder—Fiction. 3. Medical examiners (Law)—Fiction. 4. Forensic pathologists—Fiction. 5. Women physicians—Fiction. I. Title.
    PS3553.O692B64 2012 2012026347
    813'.54—dc23
    Title page photographs by Patricia Cornwell © 2012 by Cornwell Entertainment, Inc.
    This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 
    To Staci—
    You make it possible and fun.

prologue
    October 22, 2012
    6:20 a.m.
    Where the Red Willow and Wapiti Rivers merge in the Peace Region of northwestern Alberta, dark green waters tumble and foam around fallen trees and gray sandy islets with white pebble shores.
    Black spruce and aspens are thick on the hillsides, and saplings grow at steep angles on riverbanks and cliffs, the slender boughs straining toward the sun before gravity bends them and snaps them in half.
    Dead wood litters the water’s edge and collects in nests of split trunks and splintered branches that rapids boil around and through, the debris moving downstream in the endless rhythm of life thriving and dying, of decay and rebirth and death.
    There is no sign of human habitation, no man-made trash or pollution or a single edifice I can see, and I imagine a violent catastrophe seventy million years ago when a herd of migrating pachyrhinosauri perished at once, hundreds of them thrashing and panicking as they drowned while crossing the river during a flood.
    Their massive carcasses were fed upon by carnivores, and decomposed and disarticulated. Over time, bones were pushed by landslides and currents of water, becoming glacial deposits and outcrops almost indistinguishable from granitic bedrock and loose stones.
    The scenes flowing by on my computer screen could be of a pristine wilderness that has remained untouched since the Cretaceous Age, were it not for an obvious fact: The video file was made by a human being holding a recording device while skimming over shallow water, careening at precarious speeds around sandbars and semi-submerged boulders and broken trees.
    No recognizable details of the jetboat’s exterior or interior or the pilot or passengers on board are shown, only the aft deck’s metal rail and the shape of someone blacked out by the sun’s glare, a sharply outlined solid shadow against bright rushing water and an open blue sky.

one
    I CHECK MY OVERSIZED TITANIUM WATCH ON ITS RUBBER strap and reach for my coffee—black, no sweetener—as distant footsteps sound in the corridor of my bullet-shaped building on the eastern border of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s campus. It isn’t light out yet this third Monday of October.
    Seven stories below my top-floor office, traffic is steady on Memorial Drive, rush hour in this part of Cambridge well under