The Bone Bed

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