The Bone Bed

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