“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 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.