The Bone Bed

attorney would destroy her on the witness stand.
    “What’s going on?” I say to her, since she’s the one who has been texting, saying she needs to see me.
    “When you’re done?” It’s her way of telling me that Sil Machado needs to leave.

thirty
    LUCY EXPLAINS THAT PEGGY STANTON IS CONNECTED TO the paleontologist missing in Alberta, Canada.
    The fake Twitter page used to dupe Marino was set up by the same person who e-mailed the video clip of the jetboat on the Wapiti River, my niece says. The footage was recorded on Emma Shubert’s iPhone around the time she vanished thousands of miles northwest of here.
    “The Twitter account with the handle
Pretty Please
was opened August twenty-fifth, and Twitter verified it by e-mail sent to
BLiDedwood.
” Lucy spells the username. “The avatar is a photo of Yvette Vickers when she was in her heyday in the fifties.”
    I reply I don’t know who that is, as I look around the space my niece is in.
    “A B-list actress Marino wouldn’t be familiar with. I wasn’t, either. I had to use facial-recognition software to figure it out,” Lucy says. “She’s believed to have died of natural causes in 2010, was dead the better part of a year before her body was discovered in her run-down Los Angeles home. She was mummified.”
    “It’s probably not a coincidence that she was picked for the avatar.” I think of what Benton said.
    A serial killer. Someone older
.
He targets mature women who represent someone powerful he’s obsessed with destroying.
    “All Marino’s going to see when he gets the first tweet from Peggy Lynn Stanton is a picture of a beautiful sexy woman,” Lucy is saying. “Someone who describes herself as
into things
old with character
and she
doesn’t mind keeping score because hers is impressive.
”
    “The Twitter account was opened two days after Emma Shubert disappeared from the campsite in Grande Prairie.” I make that observation as I’m making other ones.
    Lucy’s office is Spartan, brightly lit, with silvery electronic equipment that does what she directs, and thick hanks of bundled cables, docks for charging various devices, routers, scanners, and very little paper. There are no photographs, nothing personal, as if she has no life, and I know better. She has something, and I’m constantly aware of the large signet ring on her index finger, a rose-gold ring that I don’t believe is hers. I’ve never known her to wear another person’s ring, and I’m going to find out.
    “Two days was enough time for someone to abduct and kill Emma Shubert and get back to this area,” Lucy speculates. “But what the hell’s the connection? Why was he up there in the land of dinosaurs and tar sands, and what does it have to do with a victim in Cambridge?”
    “You’re absolutely sure it’s Emma Shubert’s phone?” I ask. “That he’s got her iPhone?”
    “Yes, and I’m going to explain it.”
    “The Canadian police, the FBI . . . ?” A serial killer, I again think, and those who count don’t know the details Lucy is telling me.
    “I can’t tell them for a fact that Emma Shubert and Peggy Stanton are linked,” Lucy replies, and I understand it, but I’ll have to do something, and she knows I will.
    She can’t tell police or the Feds unless she explains how she came to her conclusions.
    “Of course, we don’t know what happened to Emma Shubert, but I’m guessing nothing good,” Lucy says, and she’s somber and hard, her determination unyielding.
    “Well, she’s either a victim or involved in all this,” I comment.
    “Since it appears no one has heard from her for two months, I’d say it’s one or the other. She’s either not innocent or she’s dead.”
    “Marino
wouldn’t
be familiar with the actress’s photo used in the avatar, or he
wasn’t
?” I want to know what Lucy has told him.
    “He doesn’t know, didn’t know,” she says. “He tweeted
Pretty Please
twenty-seven times thinking it was a hot young woman named Peggy Stanton. He’s enraged about it. We were having it out last night because it’s made him feel stupid. At this point it’s lost him his job. He’s fucking crazed, ready to kill someone.”
    “He never tried to look her up? He never tried to find her address, her phone number, to verify who she is? Jesus, what kind of detective, what kind of investigator, is he?” I can’t help but feel frustrated and angered by his carelessness.
    “He wasn’t being an investigator when he was