Bone Hunter Page 23
Onlookers shifted their weight from one leg to another, cleared their throats. Some looked sideways at a hawk that now circled lazily over a distant reach of grassland, or found portions of the palms of their hands that suddenly required scrutiny.
Dan inhaled, exhaled, and looked up. “Now … follow me!” Smiling like a Hannibal who has just crossed the Alps and spotted the green valleys below, he turned, merrily waved one arm in a “wagons ho” arc over his head, tromped out into the basin, and turned sharply left. The crowd flowed along behind him, conversations rising in anticipation.
As I rounded the corner, I could see where the site was. It was something less than a quarter mile away, tucked into a bed of shale close in against the toe of a steep fan of car-size rocks that had fallen from the cliff above. The quarry itself was small, perhaps only twenty by a hundred feet in area. I could see a hole, and surrounding rubble, and a desert camouflage tarp thrown back, and Vance running, yelling, screaming toward us. His arms windmilled with horror. I could not understand what he was saying. It did not sound like words.
“What is it, Vance?” Sherbrooke called, for once remembering his protege’s name.
“Vandals!” came the answer. “The thieving bastards got our site, Dan! Oh, Dan, they got it all!” Vance tripped on a rabbitbrush, fell, and lay howling in pain that had nothing to do with his body.
Sherbrooke threw his bulk into high gear and ran toward the site, joined by several alarmed colleagues. Allison Lee stopped to lift Vance to his feet, but the young man had no strength and tumbled backward. She knelt and held him in her arms, a windswept Pietà of the desert. I found strength that I did not know I had and kicked into a sprint, desperate to arrive at the site before vital evidence was trampled. “Stop!” I panted. “Don’t step on any tracks!”
I need not have worried. As I traversed the last hundred yards of uneven ground, I could easily see the deep ruts made by heavy equipment that had come from the north, something at least the size of a backhoe, something big enough to rip the bones of a dinosaur out of the ground in huge ruthless bites.
19
THE FOSSILS WERE GONE. SHERBROOKE’S GREAT DISCOVERY, Vance’s doctorate, all gone. For a moment, the only sounds were labored breathing and the clicks of journalists’ camera shutters, the whirr of their autowinders. A gentle breeze pushed a lock of my hair across my forehead. The soft twittering of a flight of horned larks met my ears, reminding me of simpler times in the desert, when life had been just a moment with nature. But those times were just a memory; I was standing by a grave.
But the dead were missing; Tiny flecks of dark maroon bone stuck up here and there from the gray clay in which it had been embedded. Straight dark furrows like the gougings of monstrous fangs marked the site where the backhoe operator had ripped the specimens from the ground, no doubt crushing them, springing their delicate ribs, scattering their finger bones, hauling away the big pieces, reducing the rest to paste.
“Who could have done this?” asked a familiar voice of no one in particular. I looked up. It was Not Tom Latimer, the FBI agent playing dinosaur artist. I had to hand it to him—he looked as aghast as the rest of the people present, but I knew that in asking these words at this moment, he was acting as the information-gathering professional he was, timing his inquiry to strike ears at the moment of greatest vulnerability, when he was most likely to startle an answer from someone who would otherwise not have spoken.
Someone answered, “A professional. You’d have to have worked with this kind of rock to know to wet the ground first and make it soft. See the way it smeared rather than crumbled? Without wetting, this shale is like iron.”
Dan said nothing. For once, he had everybody’s attention and no words to speak. I studied him carefully, from the set of his jaw to the slope of his shoulders and the hang of his hands. He was in shock.
I was in shock, too. I understood now what George had been yelling about Sunday morning when summoned to the phone. “You’ll bust the thing to pieces,” he had said. He had been talking about this fossil.
I looked past him toward Lew, expecting to see at least a sagging jaw or some other measure of surprise, but he seemed only smug. I tried to decide whether this was just his usual manner, frozen in place from years of affectation, or a reflection of his current feelings. He caught me looking at him and shifted suddenly, his hand rising to cover the lower half of his face defensively.
A journalist began to step down into the excavation, but I grabbed him by the sleeve. “Please stay out of the diggings,” I said crisply. “It will be necessary for the FBI and the BLM to see this mess in as pristine condition as possible if they’re going to hope to find out who did it.” I glanced cautiously at Not Tom Latimer to see if I was saying this correctly. He did not make eye contact. He had melted back into the crowd and was scanning the assembled practitioners of the bone hunter’s art for reactions. His face was again quiet, impassive. I could read nothing but intense interest.
Sherbrooke’s hands pumped repeatedly into fists as he once again stirred to life. Squeezing his eyes shut, he said, “Yes. We must report this. Does anyone have a cell phone?”
A reporter answered, “Yeah, but I already tried it. I can’t get through. We must be too far from a repeater or out of line of sight. Sorry.”
“Very well,” Sherbrooke replied, turning back toward the path he had followed to reach his destroyed dream. “Then we shall go to them.”
“You can’t leave,” gasped Vance, his voice cracking like the squeal of a trapped rabbit.
Sherbrooke did not even glance back over his shoulder as he replied, “You want to stay here, fine. But the buses are rolling for Price.” Darkly, he concluded, “There is nothing to be gained from staying here. This site is finished.” He stormed away, his strides lengthening with determination. He was no longer Dan the jubilant, shoulders back and chest raised, or Dan the whipped, arms and head hanging; he was now Dan the avenger, head forward, fists balled, a dark cloud of fury storming across the desert floor.
AT PRICE, DAN’S fury fizzled to maudlin self-pity when he discovered that the office of the Bureau of Land Management was bereft that day of anyone with the authority to help him. As the buses idled in the parking lot outside, he stood at the broad Formica counter, whining piteously at the secretary, demanding again and again, “Isn’t there anyone here today who can help me?”
“I’m sorry,” the woman replied, patiently matching each iteration of his plea with another version of her blank governmental ignorance, “but the geologist in charge of that site is not here. I would be glad to take a message … .”
“Where’s Shirley?” Dan whimpered. “She knows me. She’ll—”
“Shirley is on maternity leave,” said our middle-aged matron. “I am replacing her until she returns.”
Vance chose a less child-to-mama approach than,Dan. “You get on that cell phone and tell that shithead geologist of yours to get his ass down here!” he shrieked. “You may be overextended and underfunded and stupid, but this is an emergency! This is fucking Armageddon!”
The woman inclined her head forward, staring at Vance over the tops of her glasses. Knowing that a “Listen here, sonny” speech was about to follow, I quickly said, “Ma’am, excuse me, but these men have just seen a huge amount of work go down the drain. I’m hoping you can find someone who can help us. Is there anyone else in the office today with enough authority to call in a law-enforcement agency?”
The woman shifted her gaze, now appraising me. “I will see what I can do. In the meantime, perhaps you gentlemen”—she spoke the word slowly, savoring its inappropriateness—“would like to give me a number where you can be reached.”
“You aren’t getting rid of us!” squealed Vance. “We’re tax-payers! We’re—”
“Enough, Vance,” said Sherbrooke, grabbing his graduate student by the front of his shirt and dragging him summarily toward the door. “Madam, we can be reached at the Mecca Club, where we shall be drowning
our sorrows.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed at Sherbrooke’s receding back, and I knew he had just said booze to a Mormon.
PRICE MAY LIE smack near the center of a state ruled by the long arms of the Mormon church, but it grew up as a mining town, a working-class, give-me-liberty-or-get-outa-my-way sort of place, and the row of bars down the main drag of town prove it. It is an unlovely, unadorned city of outmoded square buildings built for shelter first and grace last, a place to do business, an escape from the boiling heat of summer and the raw chill of winter. The buses moved like lost elephants down the street, lumbering toward the watering hole Dan Sherbrooke had named. Two blocks west of dead center downtown, they pulled to the curb and disgorged their passengers, who followed their host through the 1950s-era doorway into the Mecca Club. Inside, the man behind the bar nodded hello to Dan. He was a tall, stiff man of advancing years. He had the bleached look of one who seldom sees the sun. He had been polishing the top of the bar when we entered, but his hand stopped moving when he saw the swarm of thirsty paleontologists that was following Dan through the door. This was Utah, wherein to order anything stronger than 3.2 beer, one may not just walk into any saloon and ask, but must be a paid member of a club. A member may, however, bring any number of guests.
Dan said, “They’re all with me.”
The bartender nodded and began to set up glasses.
And at that, Dan seemed to collapse. “The usual, and keep hitting me,” he moaned, dropping his body onto a stool. He leaned onto the bar, preparing to fold himself up in the arms of alcohol. As Dan’s paleontological brethren crowded in around him, the bartender unceremoniously poured a double shot of Jack Daniel’s, which Dan downed in a gulp. The bartender never asked, and Dan never offered, the reason for his sudden appearance with seventy close pals; it was life as usual at the Mecca Club, and what are ya havin’?
When it was my turn, the bartender turned his gray face toward me and hoisted his eyebrows a millimeter in inquiry. “You got a telephone here?” I asked.
“Through the door into the café, turn right,” he answered as he rotated his head a fraction of a degree to look at the man next to me. “Next?”
I shouldered my way through the crowd and found the back door, made a right turn at the back of the adjoining short-order café, headed down a narrow hallway that kinked back toward the bathrooms, and fetched up by a pay telephone. I punched in Ava’s number in Salt Lake City and followed it with digits from my credit card. After two rings, Ray answered.
I said, “Where’s Nina?”
“Right here. Why?”
“Like right next to the phone?”
“No. In the kitchen with Mother.”
“Can she hear you?”
“No.”
“Can she pick up an extension and listen in?”
“No. Now, what—”
“We’re in Price,” I said. “Someone got Sherbrooke’s site.”
“Got it?”
“Stripped it. Went in with a backhoe, looks like; really did a job.”
Ray’s voice took on the intensity a bird dog displays when it spots a grouse. “Where are you now?” he asked.
I told him. “It looks like this gang is settling in for a serious drunk. Nobody had much stomach for their box lunches, but they’re thirsty for a little forgetfulness. It really hit everybody hard. It’s like a wake in there, only nobody’s telling funny stories about the deceased.” I turned and glanced up the narrow hallway to make certain no one was listening. “Can you get down here? I think we can maybe follow those tracks. They stand out like a sore thumb.” I shifted the phone to my right hand, shoving my bandaged hand back out of my line of sight. For the work ahead, I could not dare to contemplate my own vulnerability.
“What are you thinking, Em?”
“Well, it strikes me like this: You’ve got a murder and the FBI’s got grand theft and racketeering. The two crimes meet in George Dishey. The murderer knew where the bones were stored, even called George out to meet him there, because that’s where the crime was committed. So far, so good?”
Ray inhaled, exhaled. “Right.”
“So the question becomes, who else is stuck between the two crimes? Well, the answer is Nina.”
Silence.
I wanted to spit. It was way past time for Ray to quit treating me like a suspect. I said, “Last night, she told me all about being George’s best bone finder. So that means she was part of a larger group. Group means family to that girl, family means polygamy, and polygamy means … well, a splinter group, right? We passed a big house on the way in here. It did not look prosperous. So maybe it’s the guy George knew in the army and maybe it’s not, but whichever way you slice it, they’re scraping for a living and at least one of them has a taste for violence. So they’ve got a scam harvesting fossils off of federal land without a permit, and she’s George’s best finder. You can damn well bet she’s been taught to evade the authorities; she’s probably been taught to think they’re the devil incarnate.”
Ray said dryly, “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” I said just as dryly. “But the fact remains that Nina is part of a group George used to find the fossils. So the question then becomes, Where are Nina’s people? Might they be out here?”
Ray’s breathing became deeper, noisier—an athlete taking on oxygen before a sprint.
I talked even faster. “So I’m down here at Dan Sherbrooke’s fossil site. Dan and George worked dinosaurs of the same time period—the Jurassic—so that means the same age of rocks. Everyone tells me that George was secretive about where he went collecting; that’s why we don’t know where Nina’s from. So who’s to say Dan didn’t stumble onto George’s harvesting grounds? I should have put it together earlier—the Morrison is famous for dinosaurs. This part of the Morrison—fight here along the San Rafael Swell—has them, in abundance, and it’s also a nice place for hiding all sorts of activities you don’t want the law to know about. Vance was cussing and shrieking about right-wing bigots all the way back to the bus. He says the swell is lousy with everything from shiftless rednecks and out-of-work coal miners to Ku Klux Klanners. Is that true?”
With some embarrassment, Ray said, “Klanners, yes.”
“Well then, how about a group of gun-toting, renegade Mormon, ultrafundamentalist, polygamist wackos? Tom whatever his name is—because it isn’t Latimer—told me you have fingerprints at Dishey’s storage unit that belong to a prize survivalist gun junkie who went underground more than twenty years ago. So maybe George began working down here a while ago and stopped at some out-of-the-way homestead to ask directions, and there he was, longer hair and a biblical beard, but George knows it’s him. The guy’s desperate now. He’s completely paranoid, he’s got a big family he’s controlling with his self-obsessed ideas, and they’re trying to make it out here on nothing but buckshot jackrabbits and Mormon tea. You ever been down here?”
I stopped to take a breath and nod to Not Tom Latimer, who had sidled in from the bar and was listening intently.
Ray paused. “No.”
That pulled at my heart. “You grew up three hours away and you never even went camping down here?”
Another pause. “Dad had asthma.”
“What about the Eagle Scouts?” I prattled.
“No, I played sports, remember?” He was trying to sound jocular. I had hit a nerve.
“Well, okay, it’s a big place with lots of little canyons. I’ve been looking at a map a man on the bus had. It’s mostly BLM land, but there are a few inholdings way out in the middle of nowhere.” I looked at Not Tom. “Just the kind of place to hide with your tribe while you wait for the year 2000 to blow you into the next kingdom, or whatever you might be expecting.”
Ray said, “I suggest you keep your voice down.”
He was right: In my excitement, I had let my volume rise. “I’m alone down a back hallway; so no, nobody’s listening. Except your pal with the salt-and-pepper crew cut here.”
Ray sighed in exasperation. “Please, Em.”
I was really rolling now, completely immersed in my theory, long past being a good girl for Ray or anyone else. I was beyond the reach of his brooding, devastatingly blue eyes. He was a pleasant abstraction back there in the tameness of the city, where everything—life, the streets—was laid out on a grid, and I was out here smelling the wildland, huddled up against a pay phone in a humble little café in a sad-looking burg built on coal in the back of nowhere, my own emotional and spiritual backyard.
I began to spin my free hand, making wider and wider gestures, willing Ray to understand what I was saying. My hurt thumb began to throb with the motion. “Or, if you really think you’re the chosen few, maybe you don’t care if you’re squatting on public lands. Maybe you think it makes perfect sense to bilk the heathen public, round up the bones of drowned animals that God has damned and sell them. But you’ve got a problem, if you don’t like dealing with the public. You’ve got to go through someone like George. George has the connections. George doesn’t mind bending the rules a little. And George knows the market for things that excite the public—he’s been feeding them science candy for years. Do you follow me? Ray?”
Ray sighed. With sadness I could not understand, he said, “Straight as an arrow.”
I had thought he’d be happy, excited as I was to be homing in on the resolution to the case. He wanted to make detective, didn’t he? So what was his problem? The chase was on! Uncertainly, I said, “Well, okay, good. Can you get a tap on Ava’s phone?”
“Why?”
Not Tom Latimer echoed Ray’s question with a tip of his head.
I said, “This is what I’m thinking: You tell Ava within Nina’s hearing that you’re coming down here to help me. Tell her we’re heading into the desert southeast of Castle Dale. You guys will need a search warrant, and you can only get one with an address, am I right? So while you’re driving down here, Ava can give Nina plenty of chances to get to a phone and warn her family. The goons listen in and get a fix on where she’s calling, and we’ll know if we’ve got the right place.” I stood up straight and grinned into the phone. This was brilliance, or so I hoped.