The Bone Bed

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    She didn’t treat all people kindly or fairly, and Peggy Stanton seemed to have withdrawn into the confined space of her own private grieving, not venturing out much unless it was to perform acts of charity.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.”

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