Bone Hunter Read online

  My smile had turned to concrete. “Thanks. I needed that, I’m sure.”

  Not Tom smiled again. “Think nothing of it. Still sure you want to do this?”

  “Sure. There aren’t any wires out there. We’re talking about the back side of nowhere.”

  “I don’t care who’s backside you’re flying around. Power lines are the least of it. Don’t forget—don’t you ever forget—that this time you’re going out there because you think the boys who got George Dishey might be waiting for you.”

  He was right. In my chase for the truth—in my haste to be right—I was leaving myself open.

  NOT TOM TURNED the car in through a gate onto the tarmac of the rural airport. The facility consisted of several low buildings and a gas pump, a few planes tied down, and, on the far side of the runway, a row of hangars. He parked the car and we got out and stared up into the sky, to the rising bluffs to the south, and down the long straight face of the Book Cliffs to the east. “Almost five,” he said, fidgeting with his car keys. “You’re running out of daylight.”

  “They could have gotten here faster by road,” I said, smiling. “But then I wouldn’t get to go flying. I don’t care what you say, I’m excited about that.”

  “Great.” Not Tom pocketed his keys and turned up the collar of his jacket. His face had gone wide-eyed and stiff, like a cowboy readying himself in the chute for a ride on a Brahma bull. He suddenly winked at me. “Let’s hope Ray ain’t the airsick type,” he said, a teasing smile finding its way onto his lips. As he continued to look at me, I stopped smiling, and he dropped his smile, too.

  “You know anything about the Mormons?” I asked.

  “A little. I’m not a Mo myself, but I’ve been out here a bunch of years. You pick it up after a while.”

  “You sound like we’re discussing a foreign language.”

  “May as well be. The church is, in fact, a subculture, anthropologically speaking. Its members have their own way of looking at things, their own way of talking, even.”

  “So now you’re an anthropologist? What are you going to be next week, a rocket physicist?”

  He gave me an acerbic look. “I haven’t always been an FBI agent,” he said. “But even in the Bureau, we study things. The more you understand people, the better we can do what we do.”

  “May I know what you think of the Mormon church?” I asked.

  Not Tom considered my question. “They have strong families. They don’t drink, don’t smoke. They cooperate toward building a strong society, humble themselves before something bigger than they are. They look after their own. Those are all good things.”

  I wished I could look at things that simply. I’d built a life for myself in Denver. It was a small life, work-harried and solitary, but satisfying enough of the time to get me past the days when I felt inclined to question what I was doing. Then I’d come out here and gotten shot at and found myself close enough to Ray to feel his heart beat, and the genie was back out of the bottle. The previous evening sitting at the Raymond family table had put me up against the fact that I felt alone and afraid in a universe in which others found contact and security, and today I’d met people who were relaxed enough to delight in the doglike auras of herbivorous dinosaurs. My cosmos was in an uproar, all previous sense of order disordered. So I gave Not Tom my most piercing look and said, “What aren’t you saying?”

  Not Tom stared at his feet and kicked idly at a pebble that had found its way onto the blacktop. “I try not to judge people for their beliefs, as long as they don’t infringe on my liberty. I’ve done my best to make peace with these things, and I leave them to make theirs.”

  I stared at the agent, this matter-of-fact man in his middle years. He was the kind of guy you might not notice, unless you look at who’s left after you subtract all the people around you who are doing something nutsy, or trying to get your attention for some neurotic reason or other. He seemed to be just hanging out, thinking deep thoughts, and watching the ball game of life. I said, “You’ve made peace, huh? How’d you pull off that little bit of mental jujitsu?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Well, I used to make myself crazy trying to decide what was true and what wasn’t, that kind of stuff. Then one day I figured out that there were more than two categories in this life; not just true and untrue but also a third category. Call it ‘I don’t know.’ In science, do you make yourself nuts over the questions you haven’t even thought to ask yet?”

  “Sometimes. It’s a possibility I have to consider.”

  “Well, I bet you don’t lose sleep over it. You tell yourself you’ll never get it all figured out anyway, so why get so uptight? And just because you can touch and smell and taste and see and hear the physical world doesn’t mean that a metaphysical world doesn’t exist right next to it, or on top of it, or in the same place. And if it does, that makes room for all sorts of possibilities.”

  “You mean like astrology, or auras.”

  A gust of wind whipped down the runway, trailing the wind sock out straight across it, a sure sign of a coming storm. A flash of lightning blanched the clouds behind us.

  The agent saw this, too, and looked reflexively toward the pass, from which he hoped to see the arriving helicopter. Nothing. He said, “I don’t make any sense out of star charts, and I sure don’t see glowing coronas around people’s heads, but that doesn’t mean someone else doesn’t. Huge portions of the world rely on astrologers, and when it comes to auras, why else would the medieval artists paint golden halos around the heads of saints?”

  “There’s a connection I’ve never made.”

  “Precisely. In my business, you learn to look at evidence from new angles, or you’re going to miss something that’s staring you in the face. Such as the possibility of being wrong about everything. But like I say, as long as no one’s getting all het up about things and assaulting my liberty to think as I please, and as long as I’m behaving myself, too, no one’s getting hurt.”

  “And so maybe if someone believes the earth is six thousand years old—which sounds like hooey to me—and they can’t perceive what I see—a divine, systematic beauty in a much older, evolving earth—maybe that’s okay.”

  Not Tom smiled another tease. “What the hell,” he said. “Everybody’s got to have a gimmick.”

  “So do you think the Mormons might be right?”

  “About what?”

  “About anything.”

  Not Tom’s smile broadened. “Boy, mething’s sure got your fire lit. Or somebody.”

  “Yeah,” I said simply. I had learned something from Magritte after all: that being direct and dropping the defensive bullshit had a certain charm, and got business done a whole lot faster.

  The agent raised his eyebrows appreciatively. “I heard it said once that the maturity of a civilization can be measured by its ability to laugh at itself. Maybe the Mormon culture can’t do that yet.” He shrugged again. “But what the hell, maybe mainstream America hasn’t arrived at the belly-laugh stage yet, either. And like I said, Mormonism is a subculture. Or call it a ‘tribe.’ Different from your tribe, I’ll wager, different in big ways. It’s hard to change tribes, real hard.”

  We heard the sound of an aircraft engine and both immediately turned around, the wait beginning to press on our nerves.

  A small plane that had taxied to the end of the runway had started its takeoff roll. I watched it accelerate, rotate its nose upward, dip a wing into the cross-wind, and rise into the late-afternoon air. Five hundred feet into the sky, it turned eastward and darted away from the storm. I looked westward. The clouds over the pass seemed to be thinning.

  I kept talking to distract myself from the tension that was consuming my bowels. “Okay,” I said, “you’re talking about laughing at yourself, as in the ability to see ironies. But what about lies? You got a place for them in your pantheon?”

  “Lies?”

  “It seems to me this whole case—for that matter, everything that’s happened to
me since I arrived in Utah—has revolved around lies. George Dishey was a gold-plated liar. He lied to get me here. He lied to his colleagues, it seems, pumped out lies and fiction and plain old wild-assed ideas just to keep the joint jumping. He lived a lie with Nina. I’m betting a lie got him killed. But how did he get away with telling lies for as long as he did? His colleagues tried to throw him out long ago, but they couldn’t, could they? No, because he just popped up somewhere else, dishing up his exciting stories to the popular press. They couldn’t blow the whistle then. Why not? Because they didn’t want to look priggish, or, worse yet, they didn’t know for certain which part of George’s palaver was truth and which was fiction. It’s the uncertainty we all deal with in the sciences, and if you don’t stay humble, you wind up just as buffoonishly vain as old Dan Sherbrooke, setting yourself up for one kind of a fall or another.” Nervousness was making me garrulous again.

  Not Tom said, “Ah, so that’s why we heard Sherbrooke credit Dishey’s ideas as having stimulated research. His ounce of humility.”

  “Yeah. And the irony is, he’s probably right about that. Science is done by human beings, after all, and, as you say, we have a way of collecting into tribes. The Flat Earth tribe, the Expanding Universe tribe, the Survival of the Fittest tribe. It’s something of a stunt to think original thoughts when you know you’re going to get a whole lot better funding for your project if you agree with the status quo. Sometimes it takes a gadfly like George to annoy people into new ways of thinking.”

  “So you’re saying that scientists are not always impartial.”

  “Hah. We get wedded to prevailing beliefs just like the next person. The difference with most of us is that we take pains not to lie. Like John told me on the bus today, we trust each other’s honesty. If we misinterpret data, we’ve made a mistake. If we get hooked on a belief beyond the point of reason, we’re lying to ourselves. But it astonishes us when someone blatantly, consciously lies.”

  “Then I can see why George Dishey had such an easy time of lying.”

  A small falcon plummeted out of the sky and nabbed a rodent that had unwarily ventured too far from its burrow. “Right. So where are lies on your ‘Yes, No, I Don’t Know’ scale of reality? How far can lies coexist with the truth?”

  Not Tom ran a hand through his short, graying hair. “I wish I knew the answer to that,” he said. “I could take early retirement and go fishing.”

  “You must deal with liars all day long. Aren’t most criminals liars of one sort or another?”

  Not Tom nodded and glanced at his watch. “Some are prize liars like George Dishey—pathological liars, regular sociopaths.” He scanned the western sky for the arrival of the helicopter.

  I knew I was beginning to lean on the man, but there was something elusive I had not yet grasped about the whole George Dishey conundrum, and as the sun began to slide toward the western horizon, I felt I had to grasp it quick before I got on that helicopter and flew out into who knew what. I needed to understand who was out there, what was waiting for me. “I couldn’t lie to save my life. At least not to anyone but myself. I gave it up in adolescence. It was just too difficult to keep track of what I’d said to whom. If I told the truth, I could keep track of it, because the truth makes sense to me. So how do criminals get away with it? Don’t they teach you something about that in FBI school?”

  Not Tom rocked from heel to toe, still watching the sky. “Sure they do. You see, the best way to tell a lie is to attach it to the truth.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if you’re going to lie, you wrap it around something that’s true, so if you get caught, then you just say, ‘I made a mistake about that part, but this other part is true,’ and that makes you look like you meant well. If you can keep people misled, or confused, you’ve got ’em.”

  “Like George attaching a ‘special symposium’ lie to an ‘SVP Conference’ truth to get me to come to Salt Lake.”

  “You got it.”

  “But what did that buy him?”

  Not Tom turned his head to look at me, examining me in a new way. “An honest face to stand next to him. A little truth by association. You’re a nice kid. You wouldn’t have made a stink, and if you had, he’d have fed you some other line of bullshit, like that the symposium was canceled for some reason or another.”

  I fell quiet for a moment, letting “nice” and “honest” be compliments, drawing a tiny sip of nourishment from them.

  Not Tom changed the subject. “So if you’re right about Nina, George has been digging down here for quite a while.”

  “Hadn’t you been watching him?”

  “I only started looking into his activities a few months ago. I had to clear some other caseload and then start setting up my cover.” He shrugged his shoulders, hands in pockets. “This murder just kind of ripped the case open.”

  “Is that a good thing?”

  “No, that’s a bad thing. The police were able to get to his hard drive at his house before the guys with the rifles got there, and that’s good, but maybe it’ll be enough to lead us to the rest of the ring, and maybe not. George was not at the center of the network. I may be able to clean up his corner, apprehend his underlings, but in doing so, I may lose any chance of following them back to the linchpin, and it’s the connections to the central brains we’re trying to get.”

  “Then you know who that is?” I was appalled. All this, when they knew who was behind it?

  “Sure. These guys work right out in the open. They attach the lie of theft to the truth of doing business with the public. But George was too high-profile to run the shop. And too compromised by his ego.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Sherbrooke thing. Petty competition. That’s a waste of energy if you’re a crook. George was supporting his habit, staying in the game, but a shit-stirrer like him couldn’t really run the show.” He made a gesture of dismissal, a flicking gesture with one hand.

  “Or maybe he was driving Sherbrooke to find bigger and better things, so Dan would do his excavation work for him.”

  Not Tom considered this. “I don’t think so. Didn’t you say he sounded angry or upset when he was called out Sunday morning?”

  “Yes. Oh, I see what you mean. So you think whoever ripped off Sherbrooke’s site with the backhoe phoned George and told him about it, and that was how they got him to go to the storage unit so they could kill him. So they didn’t actually have the bones with them. It was just a ruse to get him there.”

  “Mm-hm. Yeah, that’s what I’ve been thinking, ever since we saw Sherbrooke’s site. And because of the way George was killed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You go to the trouble of draining the blood out of somebody’s body like that, dragging it around so the blood can soak into the soil, it has to mean something.”

  “What?”

  “Someone didn’t like George’s brand of bullshit so much that they decided it was time for him to pay. Spilling blood onto the ground is the big payment.”

  “Explain.”

  “It’s what the Mormons call blood atonement. Grisly little custom.”

  I didn’t fully understand what the man was saying to me. We were scanning the skies now, hands in pockets, watching for that helicopter like it had our lives riding on it. “So you had the same ideas I had. Why didn’t you call the Salt Lake police this afternoon instead of me?”

  “You got to the phone ahead of me. And I have to say, your idea about using Nina as a decoy is inspired.”

  “Should I take that as a compliment?”

  He looked at me again, out of the corners of his eyes. “I don’t think so. You see, now you’ve involved an uncontrollable variable. And perhaps an innocent bystander, not to mention a possible minor.”

  “The police liked the idea,” I said defensively.

  “Bert bought it. Ray was against it. Me? I just wouldn’t have had the balls.”

  I tried to take this critici
sm like a soldier, but I felt my heart sink. I was finding that I liked this man, liked working with him, and wanted him to approve of me, or at least admire my methods. “You’re right,” I said simply.

  He nodded, recording my contrition. “The thing is, you understood Nina perfectly, and that’s why they’re going with your plan. Understanding character and motivation is half the game. And if you’re right, if Nina comes to ground out here in the swell and leads us to the people we think she’s going to lead us to, we’ll have a nice tight case. But we have to keep you alive, because you’re the only one who saw Willis Teague with our friend Smeely.”

  “So what is the game? What are these people up to, and why is the FBI involved?”

  He leaned back, trying to release the tension in his spine. “They collect fossils on federal lands without permits. They fake the location records, make a specimen from another county, or even another state, sometimes even another geologic time. Then they pretty it up—take a bit of earth history and make it into a bauble—big dino in scary posture, which maybe it never struck in life—and then they sell it to the highest bidder. They create the market, jacking up prices by playing one bidder off against another, working people’s greed and vanity just like the worst of the antiques dealers. You see, fossils used to be history. Now, they’re decorations. You should see their inventory—I’ve attended the big fossil show in Denver. Made me sick—huge hall full of any kind of dead animal or plant you might want to collect. Everything from shark’s teeth mounted on refrigerator magnets to a big Edmontosaurus —full mount, three hundred and thirty thousand dollars, delivered anywhere in the world, make your corporate offices so much more attractive. And that’s just the unsexy dinosaur. That T. rex they called Sue went for eight million at Sotheby’s.”