airbrushed on. Directly across from Benton, she arranges herself in such a way as to give him an eyeful and give me one, too, and possibly Briggs, depending on the angle of her camera and what is displayed on his desktop screen.
“Both bodies are found on the same day?” She is emphatic with Briggs, almost argumentative. “Peggy Stanton’s body turns up here in the Massachusetts Bay the same day Emma Shubert turns up in Canada? Isn’t that a little too coincidental, John?”
“Exactly that, a coincidence,” Briggs states, in his calm, unflappable way, and her feminine attributes wouldn’t be lost on him as much as they would be completely dismissed. “It stands to reason whoever piled rocks on top of her out in the middle of the woods had no control over the timing of when kids searching for fossils, for dino bones, would happen upon it.”
“It’s different,” Benton says, but he’s not saying it to Burke. “The killer wanted Peggy Stanton’s body found when it was and intended to shock whoever attempted to recover it from the bay, possibly intended exactly what he got, which was the thrill of a highly publicized spectacle. His handiwork was all over the news. In contrast, when he murdered Emma Shubert he did not intend to shock whoever found her remains, because he didn’t intend for them to be found at all. He carried or dragged her body probably from the highway and into the woods and covered it with rocks.”
It’s at this point I mention Mildred Lott. I describe the parallel of missing pets that later turn up, and her fear of being kidnapped and her husband’s assertion that it would be extremely difficult for someone to pull that off. She would rather be shot on the spot than comply with an attacker, according to him, and those who knew her found her condescending and overbearing, I explain.
She didn’t treat all people kindly or fairly, and Peggy Stanton seemed to have withdrawn into the confined space of her own private grieving, not venturing out much unless it was to perform acts of charity. Emma Shubert had a singular focus, impassioned by hard, cold remnants of a prehistoric past, with very little evidence she connected with anyone.
“All three of these women are unlikely candidates for abduction and murder,” I suggest. “They were going about their business, on their own property, or carrying out their usual routines when they vanished. They were formidable and not necessarily accessible or sociable, and they weren’t quick to trust. In fact, I get the impression they weren’t trusting at all.”
“You’re pretty certain it’s one perpetrator, Kay,” Briggs doesn’t ask but states.
“I think that’s what we’re going to discover and need to keep in mind.”
“It’s one person,” Benton agrees. “And Emma Shubert was a victim of opportunity. I don’t think he planned her well in advance, or at least that what happened to her was premeditated to the degree the other two were. I suspect he was out of his normal habitat, was in the Grande Prairie area for a reason.”
“Something that ties him to northwest Alberta and also to Cambridge,” Burke asserts, as if she’s answering a question that’s not been asked.
“Maybe they met. Maybe they didn’t. But they encountered each other somehow,” Benton tells Briggs as if it’s fact, because there’s no other way it could have happened.
Emma Shubert came to the killer’s attention, became a target, and she probably had no awareness of it. He may have stalked her, followed her, and likely was waiting for her in the remote wooded campground where she was last seen alive.
“There’s no lighting. Just the ambient glow of small trailers widely spaced in the woods,” Benton says. “And it was solid overcast and raining that night.”
thirty-seven
VAL HAHN OF THE FBI’S CYBER SQUAD DESCRIBES SUMMER days in Grande Prairie as endless, with dawn coming early and darkness descending as late as ten p.m. due to the region’s northern latitude.
“The night of August twenty-third,” she tells the image of General Briggs streaming live to us, “it was pouring rain and cold enough to see your breath. By the time Emma was returning to her trailer from the chow hall after having dinner with her colleagues, it was pitch dark in the campground.”
The mosquitoes were bad, and there were warnings about bears, she adds, and the paleontologists were reminded in an e-mailed memo not to let the wet miserable weather deter them from hauling garbage to the Dumpsters.