Who are you?

Then the steep rocky slope, what I now know is a dinosaur dig site called the Wapiti bone bed, and the image dissolves into a jpg that is violent and cruel.

two

THE SEVERED HUMAN EAR IS WELL DEFINED AND DELICATE, the curved cartilage devoid of hair.

A right ear. Possibly white. Fair-skinned is as definitive as I can get. Possibly a woman’s ear, for sure not an adult male’s or a young child’s ear, but I can’t rule out an older girl or boy.

The lobe is pierced once directly in the center, the bloodstained section of newspaper the ear was photographed on easily identifiable as the Grande Prairie Daily Herald-Tribune, which would have been Emma Shubert’s local paper while she was working in northwest Canada’s Peace Region this past summer. I can’t see a date, just a portion of a story about mountain pine beetles destroying trees.

What do you want from me?

I’m affiliated with the Department of Defense, specifically with the Armed Forces Medical Examiners, or AFME, and while this expands my jurisdiction to the federal level, that certainly doesn’t include Canada. If Emma Shubert has been murdered, she won’t be my case, not unless her dead body ends up thousands of miles southeast of where she disappeared and turns up in this area.

Who sent this to me, and what is it supposed to make me think or do? Maybe what I’ve already done since six-thirty last night.

Alert law enforcement and worry and feel angry and rather useless.

A biometric lock clicks free at the forensic computer lab next door. Not Toby or some other investigator but my niece, Lucy, I realize, and I’m surprised and pleased. I thought she wasn’t coming in today. Last I heard she was heading out in her helicopter, maybe to New York, but I’m not sure. She’s been very busy of late, setting up her country home, as she calls the big spread she purchased northwest of here in Lincoln. She’s been back and forth to Texas getting certified in the new twin-engine helicopter that recently was delivered. Busy with preoccupations I can’t help her with, she says, and my niece has secrets. She always has, and I can always tell.

That U? I text her. Coffee?

Then she is in my open doorway, slender and remarkably fit in a snug black T-shirt, black silk cargo pants, and black leather trainers, the veins standing out in her strong forearms and wrists, her rose-gold highlighted hair still damp from the shower. She looks as if she’s already been to the gym and is headed to a rendezvous with someone I don’t know about, and it’s not even seven o’clock in the morning.

“Good morning.” I’m reminded of how nice it is to have her around. “I thought you were flying.”

“You’re here early.”

“I have a backlog of histology I need to put a dent in but probably won’t,” I reply. “And I’ve got court this afternoon, the Mildred Lott case, or maybe I should call it the Mildred Lott spectacle. Forcing me to testify is nothing more than a stunt.”