White Fire by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child Page A

decision has been made, it is final, and I am a very busy woman. It is now time for you to leave.”
    Corrie rose. She could feel that old, horrible, blood-boiling sensation inside her. “You dig up an entire cemetery so you can make money on a real estate development, you dump the bodies in plastic boxes and store them in a ski warehouse—and then you tell me I’ll be disrespecting the dead by studying the bones? You’re a hypocrite—plain and simple!”
    Kermode’s face grew pale. Corrie could see a vein in her powdered neck throbbing. Her voice became very low, almost masculine. “You little bitch,” she said. “I’ll give you five minutes to vacate the premises. If you ever— ever —come back, I’ll have you arrested for trespassing. Now get out.”
    Corrie suddenly felt very calm. This was the end. It was over. But she wasn’t going to let anyone call her a bitch. She stared back at Mrs. Kermode with narrowed eyes. “You call yourself an elder in the church? You’re no Christian. You’re a goddamn phony. A fake, grasping, deceitful phony .”
    On the way back to Basalt, it began to snow. As she crawled along at ten miles an hour in her car, windshield wipers slapping back and forth ineffectually, an idea came to her. Those anomalous marks she’d noticed on the bones…with a flash of insight, she realized there was possibly another way to skin this particular cat.

8
    L ying on the bed of her room at the Cloud Nine Motel in Basalt, Colorado, Corrie made her decision. If those marks on the bones were what she thought they might be, her problems would be solved. There wouldn’t be any choice: the remains would have to be examined. Even Kermode couldn’t stop it. That would be her trump card.
    But only if she could prove it.
    And to do that, she needed access to the bones one more time. Five minutes, tops—just long enough to photograph them with the powerful macro lens on her camera.
    But how?
    Even before she asked herself the question, she knew the answer: she would have to break in.
    All the arguments against such an action lined themselves up before her: that B&E was a felony; that it was ethically wrong; that if she got caught, her entire law enforcement career would be flushed down the toilet. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be all that difficult. During their visit two days before, the chief hadn’t turned off any alarm systems or other security devices; he’d simply unlocked a padlock on the door and they had walked in. The shed was isolated from the rest of the development, surrounded by a tall wooden fence and screened by trees. It was partly open to one of the ski slopes, but nobody would be skiing at night. The shed was marked on trail maps of the area, and they showed a service road leading to it from the equipment yard of the ski area itself, bypassing The Heights entirely.
    As she weighed the pros and cons, she found herself asking the question: what would Pendergast do? He never let legal niceties stand in the way of truth and justice. Surely he would break in and get the information he needed. While it was too late to achieve justice for Emmett Bowdree, it was never too late for the truth.
      
    The snow had stopped at midnight, leaving a brilliantly clear night sky with a three-quarter moon. It was extremely cold—according to the WeatherBug app on her iPad, it was five degrees. Outside, it felt a lot colder than that. The service road turned out to be snowmobile-only, covered with hard-packed snow but still walkable.
    Leaving her car at the very base of the road, by a tall stand of trees and as inconspicuous as possible, Corrie labored uphill, her knapsack heavy with gear: the Canon with tripod and macro, a portable light and battery pack, loupes, flashlight, bolt cutter, ziplock bags, and her iPad loaded with textbooks and monographs on the subject of osteological trauma analysis. The thin mountain air left her gasping, the smoke of her condensing breath blossoming in the