The Bone Bed Read Free

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,