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Back The Bone Bed Save as PDF
Chapters (48)
  1. also by patricia cornwell
  2. title page
  3. copyright
  4. dedication
  5. contents
  6. prologue
  7. one
  8. two
  9. three
  10. four
  11. five
  12. six
  13. seven
  14. eight
  15. nine
  16. ten
  17. eleven
  18. twelve
  19. thirteen
  20. fourteen
  21. fifteen
  22. sixteen
  23. seventeen
  24. eighteen
  25. nineteen
  26. twenty
  27. twenty-one
  28. twenty-two
  29. twenty-three
  30. twenty-four
  31. twenty-five
  32. twenty-six
  33. twenty-seven
  34. twenty-eight
  35. twenty-nine
  36. thirty
  37. thirty-one
  38. thirty-two
  39. thirty-three
  40. thirty-four
  41. thirty-five
  42. thirty-six
  43. thirty-seven
  44. thirty-eight
  45. thirty-nine
  46. forty
  47. two nights later
  48. credits

“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

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.”