The Bone Bed (2 page)

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.”

“It could be more than that.” Lucy’s pretty face is intensely preoccupied.

“Yes, it could be embarrassing. In fact, I fully expect it will be.” I watch her curiously.

“Make sure Marino or someone goes with you.” She has stopped midway on the gunmetal-gray carpet and is looking up at the geodesic glass dome.

“I guess it’s you I’ve heard wandering around for the past hour,” I continue to probe. “I was getting a little worried we might have an intruder.” It’s my way of asking what’s going on with her.

“It wasn’t me,” she says. “I just got here, stopped by to check on something.”

“I don’t know who else is in, who’s on call,” I add. “So if it wasn’t you I heard? Well, I’m not sure why anyone on call would be wandering around on this floor.”

“Marino, that’s who. At least this time. I’m surprised you didn’t notice his gas guzzler in the lot.”

I don’t mention that she’s one to talk. My niece won’t drive anything with less than five hundred horsepower, usually a V12, preferably Italian, although her most recent acquisition is British, I think, but I could be wrong. Supercars aren’t my area of expertise, and I don’t have her money and wouldn’t spend it on Ferraris and flying machines even if I did.

“What’s he doing here this early?” I puzzle.

“He decided to be on call last night and sent Toby home.”

“What do you mean he decided to be on call? He just got back from Florida last night. Why would he decide to be on call? He’s never on call.” It makes no sense.

“It’s just a good thing no big cases came in that required someone to go to the scene because I’m guessing Marino slept. Or maybe he was tweeting,” she says. “Which isn’t a good idea. Not after hours, when he tends to be a little less inhibited.”

“I’m confused.”

“Did he tell you he’s moved an inflatable AeroBed into Investigations?” she says.

“We don’t allow beds. We don’t allow people on call to sleep. Since when is he on call?” I repeat.

“Since he’s been having fights with what’s-her-name.”

“Who?”

“Or he’s ornamenting and doesn’t want to drive.”

I have no idea what Lucy is talking about.

“Which is rather often these days.” She looks me in the eye. “What’s-her-name he met on Twitter and had to unfollow in more ways than one. She made a real fool of him.”

“‘Ornamenting’?”

“Minis he turns into ornaments. After he drinks what was in them. You didn’t hear it from me.”

I think back to July eleventh, Marino’s birthday, which has never been a happy occasion for him and is only worse the older he gets.

“You need to ask him yourself, Aunt Kay,” Lucy adds, as I recall visiting him at his new house in West Cambridge.

Wood-sided on a sliver of a lot, it has working fireplaces and
genuine hardwood floors
, he likes to boast, and a finished basement, where he installed a sauna, a workshop, and a speed bag he loves to show off. When I drove up with a birthday basket of homemade asparagus quiche and white chocolate sweet salami, he was on a ladder, stringing strands of lighted small glass skulls along the roofline, Crystal Head vodka minis he was ordering
directly from the distillery and turning into ornaments,
he volunteered before I could ask, as if to imply he’d been buying empties, hundreds of them.
Getting ready for Halloween,
he added boisterously, and I should have known then that he was drinking again.

“I don’t remember what you’re doing today except maybe another pig farm somewhere that you intend to put out of business,” I say to Lucy, as I push away every horrible thing Marino’s ever done when he’s been drunk.

“Southwest Pennsylvania.” She continues looking around my office as if something has changed that she should know about.

Nothing has. Not that I can think of. The juniper bonsai on my brushed-steel conference table is a new addition, but that’s all. The photographs, certificates, and degrees she’s glancing over are the same, as are the orchids, gardenias, and sago palm. My black-laminate-surface bow-shaped desk she is staring at hasn’t changed. Nor has the matching hutch or the black granite countertop behind my chair, where she’s now wandering.

Not so long ago I did get rid of the microdissection system, replacing it with a ScanScope that allows me to view microscopic slides, and I watch Lucy check the monitor, powering it off and on. She picks up the keyboard and turns it over, then moves on to my faithful Leica microscope, which I’ll never give up because there isn’t anything I trust more than my own eyes.

“Pigs and chickens in Washington County, more of the same,” she says, as she continues walking around, staring, touching things, picking them up.

“Farmers pay the fines and then start in again,” she adds. “You should fly with me sometime and get an eyeful of sow stalls, piggeries that cram them in like sardines. People who are awful to animals, including dogs.”

A whoosh sounds, a text message on her iPhone, and she reads it.

“Plumes of runoff going into streams and rivers.” She types a reply with her thumbs, smiling as if whoever sent the message is someone she’s fond of or finds amusing. “Hopefully we’ll catch the assholes in flagrante delicto, shut them.”

“I hope you’re careful.” I’m not at all thrilled with her newfound environmentalist vigilantism. “You start messing with people’s livelihoods and it can get mean.”

“Like it did for her?” She indicates my computer and what I’ve been watching on it.

“I have no idea,” I confess.

“Whose livelihood was Emma Shubert messing with?”

“All I know is she found a tooth two days before she disappeared,” I reply. “Apparently it’s the first one unearthed in a bone bed that’s a rather recent discovery. She and other scientists had just started digging there a few summers ago.”

“A bone bed that may end up the most productive one anywhere,” Lucy says. “A burial ground for a herd of dinosaurs that died all at once, really unusual, maybe unprecedented. It’s an incredible opportunity to piece together entire skeletons and fill a museum, attract tourists and dino devotees and outdoors lovers from all over the world. Unless the area is so polluted nobody comes.”

One can’t read about Grande Prairie and not be aware of the economic importance of its natural gas and oil production.

“Seventeen hundred miles of pipeline carrying synthetic crude from the tar sands of Alberta to refineries in the Midwest and all the way to the Gulf of Mexico,” Lucy says, disappearing inside my bathroom, where there are a Keurig and macchinetta on the counter by the sink. “Pollution, global warming, total ruination.”

“Try the Illy MonoDose. The silver box,” I call out to her. “And make mine a double shot.”

“I believe this is a café Cubano kind of morning.”

“The demerara sugar is in the cabinet,” I let her know, as I finish my last sip of cold coffee and select play again.

What is it I’ve missed? Something.

I can’t shake the gut feeling, and I focus again on the overexposed figure whose features are blown out by the glaring sun. The person doesn’t appear to be very large, could be either a woman or a small man or possibly an older child wearing a sun cap with a veil around the sides and a wide brim that he or she appears to be holding with two fingers of the right hand, perhaps to keep the cap from blowing off. But again, I can’t be certain.

I can’t make out a single feature of the darkly shadowed face or what the person is wearing except for a long-sleeved jacket or baggy shirt and the sun cap, and there is a barely noticeable glint near the right temporal area that suggests glasses, possibly sunglasses. But I can’t be sure of anything. I don’t know much more now than I did when the attachment was e-mailed to me some twelve hours ago.

“I’ve heard nothing further from the FBI, but Benton’s arranged a meeting for later today, assuming I’m out of court in time,” I say, above the macchinetta’s steamy blasts. “More of an informal discussion, since nothing’s happened yet beyond the film clip being sent to me.”

“Something’s happened.” Lucy’s voice sounds from inside the bathroom. “Someone’s ear has been cut off. Unless it’s fake.”

three

THE EXTERNAL PART OF THE SEVERED EAR, THE PINNA,
appears to have been cleanly excised from the fascia of the temporalis muscle.

I’ve magnified the image as much as I can without its deconstructing into a blur, and the visible edges of the incised wound appear sharp and regular. I see no paleness or any hint that the incised tissue is everted or collapsed, which is what I might expect in a dismemberment that occurs long after death—if the ear was removed from an embalmed body, from a medical school cadaver, for example. What I’m seeing doesn’t strike me as something like that. The ear and the blood on the newspaper don’t look old.

But I can’t know if the blood is human, and ears are difficult. They aren’t particularly vascular, and it’s not inconceivable one could cut off an ear ante- or postmortem and refrigerate it for weeks, and it might look fresh enough in a photograph to make it impossible for me to determine if the injury happened when the victim was alive or dead.

In other words, the jpg is far from adequate for my purposes, I’m explaining to Lucy. I need to examine the actual ear, to check incised edges for a vital response, to run the DNA in the National DNA Index (NDIS), and also the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), in the event the profile is connected to someone with a
criminal record.

“I’ve already located fairly recent photos of her, plenty of them on various websites, including a few taken of her while she was working in Alberta this summer,” Lucy says from my office bathroom, as we continue to talk loudly enough to hear each other. “But obviously we can’t do a proper one-to-one. I have to adjust for size, angle it just right, but the good news is the overlay is at least helpful because she’s definitely not a rule-out.”

Lucy explains that she’s been comparing the jpg with photographs of Emma Shubert, attempting to overlay images of her ears with the severed one. We can’t rule out a match, but unfortunately a visual comparison isn’t conclusive, either.

“I’ll send you the file,” she adds. “You can show the comparisons to whoever comes to your meeting.”

“Will you be back around five?”

“I wasn’t aware I was invited.” Her voice sounds over the noise of another espresso brewing.

“Of course you’re invited.”

“Along with who else?”

“A couple of agents from the Boston Field Office. Douglas, I think.” I refer to Douglas Burke, a female FBI agent with a confusing name. “I’m not sure who else. And Benton.”

“I’m not available,” Lucy answers. “Not if she’s coming.”

“It really would be helpful if you’d be there. What’s wrong with Douglas?”

“Something is. No, thanks.”

Banished by both the FBI and ATF in her earlier law-enforcement life, my niece’s feelings about the Feds generally aren’t charitable, which can be awkward for me, since my husband is an FBI criminal intelligence analyst, or profiler, and I have a special reservist status with the Department of Defense. Both of us are part of what she resents and disrespects, the Feds who rejected her, who fired her.

Simply put, Lucy Farinelli, my only niece, whom I’ve raised like a daughter, believes rules are for lesser mortals. She was a rogue federal agent and is a rogue technical genius, and my life would feel shattered and vacant if she wasn’t around.

“We’re dealing with somebody pretty clever.” She emerges from the bathroom carrying two shot glasses and a small steel pitcher.

“That’s not a good sign,” I reply. “You rarely think anyone is clever.”

“Someone cunning who is smart on some fronts but too smug to realize how much he doesn’t know.”

She pours espresso, strong and sweet, with a light brown foamy layer on top, coladas that became a habit when she was with ATF’s Miami Field Office years ago, before she got into a
bad shooting.

“The address
BLiDedwood
is rather obvious.” She sets a shot glass and the pitcher next to my keyboard.

“It’s not obvious to me.”

“Billy Deadwood.” She spells it out.

“Okay.” I let that sink in. “For my benefit?”

Lucy comes around to my side of the desk and taps the granite countertop behind me, waking up the two video displays on it. Screensavers materialize in vivid red, gold, and blue, the CFC’s and AFME’s crests side by side, a caduceus and scales of justice, and playing cards, pairs of aces and eights, the
dead man’s hand
that Wild Bill Hickok supposedly was holding during a poker game when he was shot to death in 1876.

“The crest for the AFME.” She indicates the
dead man’s hand
on the computer screens. “And Wild Bill Hickok, or
Billy,
was murdered in
Deadwood
, South Dakota. For your benefit? Yes, Aunt Kay. I just hope it’s not someone in our own backyard.”

“Why would you entertain the slightest suspicion that it might be?”

“Using a temporary free e-mail address that self-destructs or deletes itself in thirty minutes?” Lucy considers. “Okay, not all that unusual, could be anyone. Then this person routes the e-mail to you through a free proxy server, this particular one a high-anonymity type with an unavailable host name. Located in Italy.”

“So no one can respond to the e-mail because the temporary account is deleted after thirty minutes and is gone.”

“That’s the point.”

“And no one can track the IP and trace where the e-mail was actually sent from.” I follow her logic.

“Exactly what the sender is banking on.”

“We’re supposed to assume the e-mail was sent by someone in Italy.”

“Specifically, Rome,” she tells me.

“But that’s a ruse.”

“Absolutely,” she says. “Whoever sent it definitely wasn’t in Rome at six-thirty last night our time.”

“What about the font?” I return to the e-mail and look at the subject line.

ATTENTION CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER KAY SCARPETTA

“Is there any significance?” I ask.

“Very retro. Reminiscent of the fifties and sixties, big squarish shapes with rounded corners supposedly evocative of TV sets from that era.
Your
era,” she teases.

“Please don’t hurt me this early in the morning.”

“Eurostile was created by Italian type designer Aldo Novarese,” she explains, “the font originally made for a foundry in Turin, Nebiolo Printech.”

“And you think this means what?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugs. “They basically manufacture paper and high-end technologically advanced printing machines.”

“A possible Italian connection?”

“I doubt it. I think whoever sent the e-mail to you assumed you couldn’t trace the actual IP,” she says, and I know what’s next.

I know what she’s done.

“In other words,” she continues, “we wouldn’t figure out the actual location it was sent from—”

“Lucy,” I interrupt her. “I don’t want you taking extreme measures.”

She’s already taken them.

“There are a ton of these anonymous freebies available,” she continues, as if she’s not done what I know she has.

“I don’t want you helping yourself to some proxy server in Italy or anywhere else,” I tell her flatly.

“The e-mail was sent to you by someone who had access to Logan’s wireless,” she says, to my astonishment.

“It was sent from the airport?”

“The video clip was e-mailed to you from Logan Airport’s wireless network not even seven fucking miles from here,” she confirms, and it’s no wonder she’s entertaining the possibility it might be someone in our own backyard.

I think about my chief of staff, Bryce Clark, of Pete Marino, and several forensic scientists in my building. Members of the CFC staff were in Tampa, Florida, last week for the International Association for Identification’s annual meeting, and all of them flew back into Boston yesterday around the same time this e-mail was anonymously sent to the CFC.

“At some point prior to six o’clock last night,” Lucy explains, “this person logged on to Logan’s free wireless Internet. The same thing passengers do thousands of times a day. But it doesn’t mean the person who sent the e-mail was physically in a terminal or on a plane.”

Whoever it is could have been in a parking garage, she says, or on a sidewalk, possibly in a water taxi or on a ferry in the harbor, anywhere the wireless signal reaches. Once this person was connected, he created a temporary e-mail account called
BLiDedwood @Stealthmail
, possibly using word-processing software to write the subject line in Eurostile, and cutting and pasting it into the e-mail.

“He waited twenty-nine minutes before sending it,” Lucy says. “Just a shame he has the satisfaction of knowing it was opened.”

“How would this person know I opened the e-mail?”

“Because he didn’t get a bounce-back
nondelivery
notification message,” she replies. “Which he would have gotten just seconds before the account self-destructed. He has no reason not to assume the e-mail was received and opened.”

Her tone is different. What she’s saying sounds like a reprimand.

“The bounce-back is instant and automatic for harassing or virus-infected communications sent to the CFC’s main address,” she reminds me. “The purpose is to give the sender the impression that the e-mail couldn’t be delivered
.
But in fact with rare and unfortunate exception, suspicious e-mails go directly into what I call quarantine so I can see whatever it is and assess the threat level,” she emphasizes, and I realize what she’s getting at. “I didn’t see this particular e-mail because it wasn’t quarantined.”

The rare and unfortunate exception she’s talking about is myself.

“The firewalls I’ve set up recognized the e-mail as legit because of the subject heading
Attention Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta
,” she says, as if it’s my fault, and it is. “Something directed to your personal attention doesn’t get spammed or temporarily outboxed in quarantine because that’s been your directive to me. Against my wishes, remember?”

She holds my gaze, and she’s right, but there’s nothing I can do about it.

“You see the consequences of my allowing you to cheat what I’ve secured?” she asks.

“I understand your frustration, Lucy. But it’s the only way a lot of people, particularly police and families, can reach me when they don’t know my direct CFC contact information,” I say what I’ve said before. “They send something to my attention and I certainly don’t want it spammed.”

“It’s just too bad that you’re the one who opened it first,” Lucy says. “Of course, typically Bryce probably would have before you had the chance.”

“I’m glad he didn’t.” My chief of staff is very sensitive and more than a little squeamish.

“Right. He didn’t because he was on his way back from a trip. He and several others had been out of pocket for a week,” Lucy says, as if the timing wasn’t an accident.

“Are you worried that whoever sent the e-mail knows what’s going on at the CFC?” I ask.

“It worries me, yes.”

She rolls a chair close, refills our shot glasses, and I smell the fresh grapefruit scent of her cologne, and I always know when my niece has been on the elevator or has passed through a room. I can close my eyes and recognize her distinctive fragrance anywhere.

“It would be foolish not to consider someone might be paying attention to all of us and what we’re doing,” she is saying. “Someone into games who thinks he’s smarter than God. Someone who gets off on traumatizing people and jerking them around.”

I have no doubt about why she’s been snooping around my office this morning. She stopped by
to check on something
because she’s overly protective of me, vigilant to a fault. Since Lucy was old enough to walk she’s demanded my attention and watched me like a hawk.

“Are you worried Marino’s involved? That he’s spying on me or trying to hurt me somehow?” I log in to my e-mail.

“He sure as hell does stupid things,” she says, as if she has specific ones in mind. “But he’s not that savvy, and what motive could he have? The answer’s none.”