Suspecting isn’t good enough, and I replay the clip, returning to a stretch of river an hour by jetboat from a sheer barren hillside where American paleontologist Dr. Emma Shubert was digging with colleagues from the University of Alberta when she vanished almost nine weeks ago. According to statements made to the police, she was last seen on August 23 at around ten p.m., walking alone through a wooded area of a Pipestone Creek campsite, headed to her trailer after dinner in the chow hall. The next morning her door was ajar and she was gone.

When I talked with an investigator from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police last night I was told there was no sign of a struggle, nothing to indicate Emma Shubert might have been attacked inside her trailer.

“We must find out who sent this to me,” I say to Lucy. “And why. If it’s possible the figure in the jetboat is she, what was going on? What’s the expression on her face? Happy? Sad? Frightened? Was she on the boat willingly?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“I want to see her.”

“You’re not going to on this video clip. There’s nothing more to see.”

“Was she on her way to the bone bed to dig or returning from it?” I ask.

“Based on the position of the sun and satellite images of that part of the river,” Lucy says, “the jetboat likely was traveling east, suggesting it was morning. Obviously the day was a sunny one, and there weren’t many of those in that part of the world this past August. Not so coincidentally, two days before she vanished, the day she found the pachyrhino tooth, it was sunny.”

“So you’re thinking the video was taken on August twenty-first, based on the weather.”

“Apparently she did go to that site that day, traveled by jetboat to the bone bed on the Wapiti River.” Lucy repeats information that’s been in the news. “So the video might have been recorded on an iPhone during the boat ride there that morning. She has an iPhone. Or did. As you know, it was missing from her trailer. It may be the only thing that’s missing, since other personal effects allegedly were undisturbed.”

“The footage was filmed on an iPhone?” This is new information.

“And the photo of the severed ear,” Lucy says. “A first-generation iPhone, which is what she had.”

I’m not going to ask Lucy how she managed to acquire these details. I don’t want to know.

“She still had the first one she’d gotten, didn’t bother upgrading, probably because of the contract she had with AT and T.” Lucy gets up and returns to the bathroom to rinse our shot glasses, and I detect distant voices down the corridor.

Then I hear the recorded sound of a police siren, one of Pete Marino’s ringtones. He’s with someone. Bryce, I think, and they’re headed in this direction. Both of them are on their cell phones, only the sounds of their words coming through, and I can tell by the energy in their voices that something has happened.