Bone Hunter Read online

  ON THE WAY to the Salt Palace, where I would meet the bus, Ray turned down Second Street South. The Salt Lake City police station loomed into view.

  “Why are we stopping here?” I asked uneasily.

  “Someone here wants to talk to you,” Ray said.

  “Who? You aren’t taking me in for more questioning, are you?” Ghosts of the horrid treatment I had witnessed there the day before flashed before my eyes. Was he going to keep me there all day, to keep me out of trouble? And worse yet, had they found new evidence that suggested that I had killed George Dishey? What did they have on me? I did not have Nina’s capacity to curl up in a ball and ignore them, and for a moment even the threat of interrogation had me thinking I must somehow have killed George; in my sleep, perhaps. The bronze teeth made me do it. God only knew.

  As the memory of my awful nightmare about teeth rose again in my mind, the method of George’s dispatch from among the living finally struck me. “Oh no!” I gasped.

  Ray pulled his vehicle quickly to the curb and put a hand on my shoulder. “What is it?” he asked.

  I looked at him in horror. “Oh, Ray, I know how George got those wounds.”

  “How?” He didn’t want me to know; I could see that in his eyes.

  I narrowed my eyes in fury. “Ray, I don’t want to tell you, because then you’re going to get it jammed even further into that brain of yours that I could have done it. So what will it be, Ray? You going to trust me, or what?”

  He exhaled slowly. In an instant, he seemed to age ten years. “How?” he asked sadly.

  I closed my eyes in resignation, certain I could not tell him. But then it dawned on me why Ray could not trust me. He couldn’t trust me because he was in love with the truth more than anything else, and people in love with the truth scrutinize everything, even their mother’s love for them. So that meant there was only one way to deal with Ray, and that was to tell him the truth and withhold nothing.

  I said, “Whoever killed George did it with the Golden Jawbone.” I told him about the Allosaurus jaw, with its long, curving teeth and their sharp serrations, so lovingly reproduced in bronze.

  Ray winced.

  “Yeah,” I said, “that’s why there were all those puncture wounds, and all in rows, and that’s how all those deeper gouges were cut. He was disemboweled, just like a Jurassic lunch. He almost always had the thing on him, or at least in his backpack. That’s what people say. I’ve held an original in my hand now, an actual fossil. Only the one I held was smaller than George’s, a juvenile. It was a fearsome thing, but it fit my hand. There are protuberances along the anterior end of the thing that would give a person a good grip, and the bronze would have given it momentum. Those teeth were made to cut. In the hands of an angry man, the full-sized bronze would have been a cruel weapon.”

  Ray’s jaw muscles worked. He was thinking.

  “And if you think for a minute I could have done that to another human being, let alone any other animal, or even a gunnysack full of oats, you just don’t know me very well yet. I’m an angry person, yes; but I’m not violent.”

  Ray sighed. After a moment, he turned and looked down the street through the windshield, then restarted the vehicle and moved on down the block to the police station. There, he parked his vehicle in the lot and led the way through the check station and up the elevator to the same floor on which Detective Bert had grilled us both the day before. My stomach tightened as I braced myself for another battle of wills. “When we get in there,” I told Ray, “I’m going to ask that horse’s hind end Bert whom he told about my whereabouts.”

  Ray ducked his head and knit his eyebrows. I knew Ray’s body English so well by now that he may just as well have said I’d guessed right.

  I rounded on him. “Who did he tell?”

  Ray closed his eyes in resignation. “Sherbrooke.”

  “Sherbrooke,” I muttered. “Mr. Wonderful. Mr. Big Guy. Mr. Get in Bed with Murderers. Mr … . So he killed George?” I was surprised to realize how much the idea surprised me.

  “I don’t know,” he said firmly.

  But Sherbrooke had been at the conference yesterday morning at the time someone was going through my room. Or was he? I tried to remember. I couldn’t recall actually seeing him. Did he send Vance? No, Vance was at the conference. Lew? No, I wouldn’t trust him with a job like that—too self-interested. Then whom had he sent? The commercial collector with the Australian hat?

  I was going to get some answers, and the time was now. I traversed the last ten yards to that doorway, and, with my head down like a ram about to butt its enemy, I entered the room.

  “¡Hola!” said a familiar voice, very cheery. “So nice to see you, my friend.” It was Sergeant Ortega.

  I went stiff with surprise. I said, “Carlos, how’d you—”

  My round brown friend held up a hand to quiet me and smiled a parody of his most self-effacing smile. “Me? I got on a plane is all, last evening. It was past midnight, to be exact, because that was about when I could no longer believe that I could sleep. I told myself, Carlos, your friend cares for you, and she would call like she said she would if she was safe. So she is not safe. You must go to Salt Lake City and see if you can help her.”

  I closed my eyes in shame, wanting at the same time to slug him for delivering his punishing line in front of Detective Bert. “Carlos, I’m …”

  “Sorry,” he said, guiding me out of the room. “Em Hansen is always sorry. She would stay in better touch, but she has better things to do. But right now, your better thing is to find your friend a nice jelly doughnut, don’t you think?”

  I melted into his warmth and snaked an arm around his ample waist. Halfway down the hall, I said, “I don’t know where they keep the doughnuts, Carlos.”

  “I do,” he said merrily. “Hey, I been here three hours already. You think I don’t got my priorities? First thing I do is find the doughnuts. Next thing, a good burrito stand. But now is still breakfast-time, so now is more doughnuts.”

  IN THE EMPLOYEES’ snack bar, I watched Sgt. Carlos Ortega of the Denver Police Department Homicide Squad down three jelly doughnuts and spoon three heaping teaspoons of sugar into his coffee as I brought him up to speed on the life and death of George Dishey, Ph.D.

  “Nasty,” Carlos said as he licked sugar off his thumb and forefinger. “Very nasty. Whoever killed him was very angry.”

  “The marks they made—”

  “I seen the pictures. Regular Bundy. Pass the cream, will you?”

  “Since when do you take cream in your coffee?”

  “Doctor told me to eat a more balanced diet,” Carlos said. “So I’m putting leche in my café. It’s very good.”

  I took a moment to look over my rounded friend. The doctor was right: He did not look as healthy as I had once known him. He had gained even more weight, there were new lines in his face, and here and there I saw threads of silver in his straight black hair. Carlos was beginning to age, and I had just done my bit to accelerate the process. “I’m sorry about not calling, Carlos.”

  “I know.”

  “It must have cost a mint to fly here on such short notice.”

  “My sister Rosita is a stewardess on United. She got me on free.”

  “Oh.” I felt deflated.

  “And I got to take the ten o’clock back. Big meeting this afternoon in Denver. But yes, I was worried, and I phoned here and they didn’t know where you were.

  “Ray didn’t tell them where I was?”

  Carlos shook his head. “He must like you. So they asked me a lot about you, so I thought maybe if I came here I could help a little, get you home sooner.”

  “Thanks. Really.” Then it hit me: Bert, or someone else, had showed Carlos the photographs. Carlos had been playing with me. I said, “How much else did they tell you, you … how you say ‘tease’ in Spanish?”

  Carlos wiped his soft lips with a paper napkin and said, “This Bert is an interesting character, full of bluster, but
he left the room for a while, and the file was not difficult to find. Professional courtesy. What you want to know?”

  “Tell me.”

  “You got to ask.”

  “Carlos! Where’d it happen?”

  “Where do you think?”

  “Well, inside city limits.”

  “Why do you think that?” he said, his shoulders heaving with merriment. He had lost a night’s sleep over me, and he was going to have his fun. Unfortunately for me, cops are into sick jokes.

  “Simple. It had to be, or it’d be someone else’s jurisdiction. Voilà.”

  “Oh, now you’re French. Qué bueno.”

  “So you tell me how the body was found, and where.”

  All merriment vanished from Carlos’s face. “It was a very nasty scene. The body was found Sunday morning at a self-storage unit by a man who had gone out to get his speedboat. He had the unit next to the deceased’s. Deceased had an end unit. The roll-up door was closed and locked, but there was a smear of fresh blood leading out from under the door, across the pavement, and around to the side of the building. He found the body there, facedown in the dirt.”

  Hence the scraped nose and face-down lividity. But why drag the body out the door? Not only did this not hide the body; it made the murder more obvious by leaving a trail of blood. And if the murderer wanted to give himself time to escape, he should have left the body in the storage unit and just close the door. “So the guy who found it called nine one one, and the rest is history.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What else they got to go on? Fingerprints? Footprints?”

  “Oh, a few things. Boot prints in the blood, the things that were in the storage unit.”

  “Right. Anything distinctive about the boot prints?”

  “Government-issue boots, the kind of cheap mass-produced stuff you can pick up at any surplus store.”

  “As opposed to the newer cheap mass-produced stuff that’s coming out of China and Korea.”

  “Corecto.”

  “What was in the unit?”

  Carlos took a long draft of his coffee. “Bones.”

  A little ping went off in my head. Little connections went click. “You mean fossil bones.”

  “Yes.’”

  “So who was this unit rented to? George?”

  “Lo mismo.”

  “George alone.”

  “Verdad.”

  “So that’s why there weren’t any fossils to speak of in his house,” I said.

  Carlos looked questioningly at me.

  “A paleontologist needs bones to study,” I explained. “You can use the collections at museums, but you also go out and find your own. George worked with very large animals, dinosaurs. Dinosaur bones take up lots of storage space. So where was he storing his collection? He wasn’t affiliated with any legitimate institutions. Everyone knew he was digging up fossils, because he was apparently selling them, so, then, where was he storing them? In the self-storage unit. It makes sense. They weren’t in his home. Two reasons. Not enough room, and the damned things are messy, kick up a lot of dust and rock matrix. If he’s got the bones at the self-storage unit, he can use his home as his academic base, keep all his books and journals there, write his popular papers there, and process the bones through a storage locker. Kind of like separating church and state.”

  Carlos nodded affably.

  I said, “Thing is, though, that his esteemed colleagues said he was selling bones. I’m thinking that was how he was making his living, seeing as how he didn’t have any other visible means of support. So here’s a question. Did whoever killed him have an interest in those bones? Was it perhaps a business partner, or a competitor, or just an outright thief?” A person interested in the bones, who thinks dead bodies should be left outdoors.

  “It seems there is quite a bit of money in the fossil business,” Carlos.said quietly.

  I shut up and waited for him to elaborate.

  He took another sip of coffee. “There was a case up in South Dakota a few years ago. Commercial collectors dug a T. rex. They named it Sue, after the woman who actually found it. It was an extragood specimen, nearly complete. Very rare and highly prized. They told the landowner they were going to put it in a local museum, paid him a few thousand bucks. But once they had it in the lab, they put a price tag of a million dollars on it. The landowner wanted it back all of a sudden. The Sioux Indians said it was theirs. When the federal courts finally settled on who owned the thing, it was auctioned at Sotheby’s for something like eight million dollars.”

  I whistled. That was a lot of dinosaur. “You say ‘a’ case.”

  Carlos nodded, studied his coffee mug. I knew this kind of quiet in him. It meant he was considering what to tell me. There was history between us, a long, tense history of him telling me to quit cases and me defying him. And digging in deeper.

  “How bad is it this time?” I asked.

  Carlos stared into his coffee. “That guy over there by the Coke machine? He’s FBI.”

  I didn’t look around. It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder if we were being watched, but of course we were. A killer who likes blood and knows the value of bones. I gave up and stared over my shoulder at the guy. Short, salt-and-pepper hair, and a lean build. It was good old Tom Latimer, the man I had first seen at the conference and then here at the police station the day before. He gazed at me blankly through his flint-dark eyes, as if it were perfectly normal to be sitting there listening to our conversation.

  I said, “Why don’t you just join us?”

  The man picked up his coffee mug and did so. He did not say anything, just sat down at our table and continued to drink his coffee.

  “Your name isn’t really Tom Latimer, then,” I said.

  “No. But you can call me that.”

  “Would you care to tell me your interest in this case?” I asked as calmly as I could.

  Not Tom Latimer set down his coffee and dumped in another container of half-and-half. “Oh, customs fraud, wire fraud, mail fraud, things like that.”

  I about fell across the table into his face. “George Dishey?” I said.

  The FBI agent shrugged his shoulders. “Hard to prove. That Sue case led to discoveries that led to prosecution under the RICO Act. Racketeering. Organized crime. You lift a fossil off of federal land and say you got it off of private, so you’re doctoring the paperwork right there, but all you’ve done so far is collect without a permit and lie a little. But then you use the phones and the mails to make a sale, and that’s wire fraud and mail fraud, because it’s stolen property. Then you transport it through U.S. Customs to, say, Japan, where you’ve got a collector who wants it for his bank lobby. You tell customs the price tag was a hundred thousand, but the Japanese paid you five. Customs fraud. You got maybe a couple dozen people helping you, and you start paying off a park ranger to tell you when the patrols are so your guys won’t get caught poaching. Racketeering. Organized crime. All felonies. All federal.”

  I said, “So George Dishey was selling fossils, and you maybe suspect him of some of the above. And maybe Dan Sherbrooke’s even involved. And maybe …” I let my voice trail off. There were too many possibilities.

  Not Tom Latimer nodded. “Like I say, very hard to prove. You got to get the paperwork.”

  “And now the guy’s dead,” I observed.

  “Yes,” he said. “But with George Dishey, there’s another interesting little wrinkle. We didn’t have enough to get a warrant on him to search his storage unit until he turned up dead, but then it’s evidence for a capital crime, and we had it top to bottom.”

  “So you found the paperwork?”

  “No. Other evidence. We looked for fingerprints.”

  “Right.”

  “And whoever did the murder was smart enough to wear gloves. No discernible marks in the blood, and you know we tried. But there were other fingerprints. Some of them may have been old, but they were readable. And one of them was quite interesting to us.”r />
  “Who?” I asked. Vance? Lew? Dan Sherbrooke?

  “It was a guy named Willis Teague. The name won’t mean anything to you, but it does to us. We were following his activities with great interest, right after he went AWOL from the service while being investigated for bootlegging military weapons off-base.”

  “‘Were’ following him. Not ‘are’ following him?”

  “His predilection for illegal weaponry would have interested us enough, but then we got word he had joined a paramilitary extremist group. Then he got crosswise with its leaders and went even further underground from there. Lost track of him twenty years ago.”

  I did some mental math. “So he was in Vietnam. Was he a helicopter pilot?”

  “Funny you should ask.” Not Tom Latimer smiled at me, a nice, slow, conspiratorial smile.

  “He was the guy in the picture at George’s house,” I said.

  “Smart woman. The police missed that one, but I caught it when I went through the house yesterday. I called up George’s service record, and there was our man Teague. George was part of an intelligence unit, and Teague was part of his crew. But things didn’t go well for them. They got into trouble for trading army rations to starving villagers for their family heirlooms. Antique altars, artifacts like that. Not that such peccadilloes were all that unusual, but George forgot to polish the right brass, and the two did a little time in the brig.”

  “George, George,” I said, shaking my head. “And this Teague. Missing for twenty years, you say. Which means he’s not dead, but you’ve been looking for him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “It seemed he used his helicopter to drop napalm on the villagers’ crops, just to make sure they were hungry enough to part with the goods. And he had certain other rather antisocial proclivities.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as ‘liberating’ land mines from the army base they rotated him to back home, that sort of stuff. Oh, and aggravated assault, but that’s more a matter for the police.”

  “And good old George had a picture of this guy in his house.”

  The FBI agent leaned back and smiled pleasantly. “Kinda makes you wonder.”