kitchen counter in case anything happened that I should know about immediately. In a mellow mood, I was preoccupied with making one of his favorite dishes, risotto con spinaci come lo fanno a sondrio, waiting for water to boil in a saucepan, drinking a Geheimrat J Riesling that made me think of our recent trip to Vienna and the poignant reason we were there.
I was lost in thoughts of people I love, preparing a fine meal and drinking a gentle wine, when the e-mail with its attached video file landed at exactly 6:30 Eastern Standard Time.
There was no message, just the subject heading: ATTENTION CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER KAY SCARPETTA, in a bold uppercase Eurostile font.
At first I was simply puzzled by the eighteen seconds of video with no audio, a cut-and-pasted jetboat ride in a part of the world I didn’t recognize. The film clip seemed innocent enough, and meant nothing to me as I viewed it the first time. I was sure someone had e-mailed it by mistake until the recording suddenly stopped, dissolving into a jpg, an image meant to shock.
I launch another search engine into cyberspace, unable to find much useful about the pachyrhinosaurus, a thick-nosed herbivorous dinosaur with a horned bony frill and flattened boss likely used to butt and gore other animals into submission. A uniquely strange-looking beast, somewhat like a two-ton short-legged rhino wearing a grotesque bony mask, I suppose, as I look at an artist’s rendering of one. A reptile with a face that’s hard to love, but Emma Shubert did, and now the forty-eight-year-old paleontologist is missing an ear or dead or both.
The anonymous e-mail was sent directly here to the CFC, the Cambridge Forensic Center, which I head, the point I can only assume to taunt and intimidate me, and I imagine a jetboat skimming over a river thousands of miles northwest of here in what looks like a lost part of the world. I study the overexposed ghostlike shape sitting in back, possibly on a bench seat, directly facing whoever was filming.
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,