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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

“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.”