Bone Hunter Read online

  The registration lady took us halfway down the stairs and pointed to a group of men and women who were chatting boisterously. “Dan Sherbrooke’s over there. The large man in the brown pants.”

  “Thanks,” I said. As I descended the rest of the thickly carpeted staircase past a stunningly large Chinese folding screen, I made a show of clipping my name badge in place on my left breast pocket, as much as to tell Officer Raymond, I am legitimate. I am a geologist, damn it, I am registered at this conference, and I did not kill George Dishey.

  The first line of the name badge read EMILY HANSEN. The second line read, in big letters, EM, and the third line, in small type, had the name of my employer and port of call: Cathcart Oil & Gas, Denver, Colorado. The badge was about three by five inches, was encased in heavy plastic, and the clip was metal. The combined weight thereof made the whole left side of my blouse sag as if I’d slept in it. So much for looking sharp; I was now grass-stained, trussed in gauze, and listing to port. I marched quickly over toward the gathering of bone men, leaving Officer Raymond to scramble along in my wake. “Dr. Sherbrooke,” I said, presenting my right hand to be shaken, as if I shambled into conferences looking like hell every day of the week. “I’m Em Hansen. Dr. Dishey invited me to speak at the symposium on forensic paleontology.”

  Sherbrooke reflexively scanned my name badge, which meant he was staring at my breast, something that always leaves me feeling a little crawly. He was tall and globular, with long, plump arms that tapered down to smooth fingers. An easy smile. Curling hair in need of a trim, with long leftover strands hovering in disarray over a shining scalp. Breath that smelled like a late breakfast rich in coffee and bacon. Metal-framed glasses repaired with monofilament fishing line passed round and round through one hinge and sloppily knotted. A real brown pants kind of guy. He looked uncomfortable, even visibly annoyed. “Ah, yes … you’re with George Dishey, you say?”

  “Yes. He invited me to speak.”

  Sherbrooke examined my face as if evaluating the bones that lay a quarter inch beneath its surface. “Hansen, you say?”

  We were interrupted by the appearance, at Sherbrooke’s left elbow, of a weaselly young man with drooping yellow mustaches, a long, messy ponytail, and the kind of beet-red skin that looks perennially sunburned. By weaselly, I mean he was short and slender and cave-chested, the kind of rat man with wire-rimmed glasses who shows up to paint your house as someone’s assistant and leaves cigarette butts in your sink. He looked so emotionally high-mileage that it took me a moment to realize that he was only somewhere in his twenties. “Dan,” he said through his narrow, nicotine-stained teeth.

  Sherbrooke rotated around to peer down on him. “What, ah, Verne?”

  “Vance!” hissed the weasel.

  “Um, Vance,” Sherbrooke said with elaborate patience. “What is it … Vance?”

  “The jackasses who run this place left the ends off the events tent last night, and a bunch of the posters blew over.” He sniffed indignantly, a sour little self-appointed god judging the mishaps of contemptible mortals.

  I found him annoying on sight, a self-pitying little pocket of poison who sickens the air around him. He made my skin itch. That description may sound just as judgmental as I’ve just accused him of being, but what goes around comes around. Besides, I was by that time in the mood to get petty. I’d been having the granddaddy of all hard days, by all appearances, the shit hadn’t stopped raining in on me yet, and I had no need of duking it out with some banty rooster attitude case. I cocked a shoulder toward him so I wouldn’t have to make eye contact and tapped one foot in impatience.

  Sherbrooke tilted his nose a few degrees higher, as if avoiding an unpleasant smell. “Tell them to put the ends on the tent.”

  “I did.”

  “Then go back there now and make sure it happens. Really, isn’t this something you can handle on your own?”

  Vance slunk away.

  I reasserted my place at Sherbrooke’s elbow and repeated, “My name is Em Hansen, and George Dishey invited me to—”

  “Oh, yes. Hmm. I’m sorry, but I don’t recall seeing your abstract submittal. Which symposium did you say are you in?”

  “My abstract …”

  “Yes, your abstract. The summary of your proposed talk. Even the invited speakers submit abstracts.” He placed a hand paternally on my shoulder, as if to say, You’re being foolish in public, darling, but there, there.

  The floor had now completely dissolved, I was indeed falling, and the earth was eating me for lunch. I had asked George if I needed to send an abstract, but he’d said no, he’d take care of everything, just show up. Well, he’d taken care of things, all right. “Did George even have a symposium scheduled?” I asked, the words clotting in my mouth. My ears began to ring with the small panic of humiliation, and the odor I was smelling was rat, a great big one.

  “George? No.” He laughed derisively. “When has George ever opened himself to the direct scrutiny of his colleagues?” Sherbrooke lifted his hand off my shoulder to wave at a colleague, gliding over my obvious upset with an attitude that suggested, We’ll just ignore your discomfort and perhaps it will go away. I saw his lips moving, but his words flowed past me like clouds, pale and empty. I blinked, strained to listen, focused in just in time to hear him say, “And just where is our dear George today, ah”—he looked at my badge again—“Em?”

  I snapped free of my shock. “Officer Raymond can tell you better than I,” I said, and stepped aside.

  Sherbrooke shifted his interest to my uniformed escort, who motioned for him to step away from the throng for a moment. It was done subtly, yet with authority. For all his comparative youth, Officer Raymond had the better moves of the two as he fetched the older man to the edge of the room. They communicated in low voices. Raymond watched intently for signs of guilt. Sherbrooke turned gray. His smile went slack and his arms dropped to his sides, giving him the aspect of a life-size doll, gape-mouthed and limp, a jelly man who’d been propped up with a stainless-steel rod up his butt to keep him stiff. As he asked questions, only his lips moved.

  Presently, Sherbrooke turned to face the room. His eyes were wide and glassy.

  Heads had begun to turn. Sherbrooke’s assembled colleagues observed him with the intense curiosity that only people with twenty-four years of schooling and decades of intense devotion to an investigative profession can generate.

  Sherbrooke took a deep breath, lifted his chest like a thespian about to spew Shakespeare, and announced in a booming yet unsteady voice, “George Dishey is dead!”

  Officer Raymond glanced quickly from face to face through the crowd, recording reactions like a high-speed camera. People turned from Sherbrooke to us. “Dead?” they gasped, like a many-headed creature with a hundred shuffling feet and two hundred voices, “He can’t be dead. I just saw him yesterday,” and “Was he ill?” and “What did he die of?”

  I wanted to know that myself.

  The crowd churned toward Sherbrooke, splitting around the tables laid with coffee to get a closer look at what was happening, their babbled questioning growing to an information-hungry growl. One man stood still, budding off the back of the flowing throng like a new creature coming into life, his behavior so singularly different that he drew my focus. He opened his mouth and barked, “About time you got that son of a bitch!”

  The crowd turned to see who had spoken, opening a corridor down the middle of the room like the Red Sea parting for Moses. I peered sharply toward the man, trying to see his eyes past the glare of overhead lights reflected on a pair of glasses as thick as Coke bottle bottoms. He was built like a truck tire, with shoulders any footballer would be proud of and graying hair cut so short it was almost invisible. He wore a faded pine green T-shirt and chino pants so old they would no longer hold a crease. I slithered around the back of the crowd until I was close enough to read his name badge. MAGRITTE, it read—just the one name in smaller print—and in large type below it, EARTHWORM. His port of call
—a junior college somewhere in California—had been struck out with a ballpoint pen, and handwritten below that was simply “Unaffiliated, God Damn It.”

  Matching the dramatic flair of Earthworm Magritte, Dan Sherbrooke boomed, “It figures you’d say something like that, Worm!”

  Earthworm Magritte jabbed his glasses up his broad nose with one short, thick finger. “Aw, hell, Dan, it’s a bummer when someone leaves the game. But shock-shock, he lived, he died. Move on. It’s not the end of the universe; it’s just one less thorn in your hide. More room for you to win the Golden Jawbone Award next time. But I suppose you gotta get dramatic and give us some homily on what a great man he was. That’s cool. Get on with it.” He offered these comments with no apparent contempt, only bald, if somewhat loud, statement of opinion.

  In the ensuing silence, Sherbrooke rolled his head back until he could sight Magritte down his nose. Slowly, he spread one hand across his rubbery chest. When all eyes were on him, he uttered, “I am in a state of grief. A colleague has fallen.”

  Magritte shrugged his thick shoulders. “Aw, the hell you say. A bullshit artist has gone splot in his own manure.”

  Now Sherbrooke evinced anger. “I don’t think you know what you’re saying,” he tolled, his voice rounding like a southern preacher’s. “We’re talking about a man who has been murdered!”

  The sharp, inquisitive eyes of two or three hundred paleontologists flicked from Sherbrooke back to Magritte, and I swung my head back too, just one more member of the Greek chorus playing Ping-Pong tournament spectator as the two major actors volleyed lines. I was thinking, This is getting ludicrous, but the look on Magritte’s face stopped me. His large, thick-lipped mouth hung wide, and his sandy eyebrows had flown up above his impenetrable glasses. “It actually happened?” he gasped.

  Sherbrooke pointed to me. “Ask her,” he intoned. All heads swiveled my way.

  I glanced desperately around for Officer Raymond, but he had faded back into the crowd. “Me?” I blurted. “Well, sure, I stayed at his house last night, but—”

  “You see?” Sherbrooke bellowed, then turned and walked away. On that nonsensical note, the Greek chorus mercifully broke up into a gaggle of clacking tongues and scanning eyes. Leaving good old me turning in the breeze, caught being unusual in a roomful of people who have made their life’s work that of studying—nay, scrucinizing—the unusual.

  This is perhaps the place where I should emphasize this fact about paleontologists, so you will understand exactly how naked I felt. Half of them begin as geologists and half as biologists, but the point where they meet is in decoding evolution, and the study of evolution is all about spotting trends and divergences from those trends. And here I was a rank newcomer with a bandaged thumb, grass stains, and the hideous luck of having slept at a dead man’s house. They observed me clinically, watching to see what I would do and what would happen to me next. I couldn’t help but wonder if they had me pegged as an endangered species.

  Grimly determined to look like the innocent bystander I was, I shifted my shoulders in line with the crowd and did some scanning of my own, recognizing some faces from television specials on dinosaurs, some names from the registration packet, others from the spines of my old geology textbooks. This was a gathering of the elite among vertebrate paleontologists, a rare, intense festival of note swapping and antenna touching among scientists, persons who as a class spent the grand bulk of their time working—by preference—in solitude. A moment ago, the atmosphere had been jolly and convivial; now, it was electric and edgy.

  I noticed the scent of pine and turned to find out where it was coming from. Earthworm Magritte was standing about five feet to my left, staring at me with frank interest. He had his thick hands spread out on his sturdy hips.

  “What’s the Golden Jawbone Award?” I asked.

  “It’s the booby prize,” he answered. “A bronze cast of the holotype of Allosaurus fragilis’s left mandible, mounted on a walnut plaque. We hold a kegger each year and give it to the guy who claims the most from the least evidence. They make a speech and gas away all they want while their audience gets stone-cold drunk. George won it the last three years running.”

  “How charming. Just the thing I want for my ego wall. I’d put it right next to my diploma.”

  Magritte recorded my quip without smiling. “You ought to see George’s ego wall. Or I guess you have. He took the jaw off the plaque two years ago and started carrying it to meetings, kind of brandishing the thing like a scepter. The king of fools.”

  “Is that how you see yourselves?”

  Magritte ignored my question. “He’d have it sticking out of his back pack on field trips to let the new recruits know he was the George Dishey. A real wise guy, our George.”

  “So he thrived on being called a bullshitter.”

  Magritte pushed at his glasses again. “In yo’ face—his favorite place to be.”

  Officer Raymond reappeared at my side. “Who’s that guy?” he asked, gesturing toward an elderly man with an aquiline nose. “And that woman, and—”

  I glanced back at Magritte. He had vanished. To Officer Raymond, I said, “One at a time. The nose is a famous Brit. Analyzes dinosaur tracks; you’ve seen him running down beaches on TV, prattling about the rate at which the big leaf-eaters could trot. Don’t know the woman.” She was petite and sharklike, with a sharp nose and fashion glasses. She was doing the same thing I was, looking from person to person to gauge reactions, her jaws rhythmically working at a wad of gum. “That guy,” I said, acknowledging the next person Raymond nodded toward, “is Jack Horner, out of Montana. He’s a MacArthur fellow. You know, the genius award. Crichton modeled the paleontologist in Jurassic Park after him. The guy next to him is Dave Gillette, another biggie; he did the Seismosaurus dig. That next guy I don’t know. Probably studies fossil shrews or something unsexy like that.”

  Raymond gave me a sharp look.

  “Big vertebrates are where it’s at in paleontology if you want to catch the public’s interest,” I said, the wild nervousness of the moment loosening my tongue. “I don’t know much about bones, never been to a meeting like this before, but just look at how many of the players I recognize, and they’re all big-bone guys. Shrews are probably in some obscure way more important to keeping the earth turning on its axis, but it’s the dinosaurs, those big dead reptiles, that capture the hearts and minds of the TV-watching public. Myself included. So if you’re a big-bone paleontologist, TV interviews are where it’s at, and PBS or the Discovery Channel or someone’s gonna beat a path to your field location and photograph you expounding on your incredible find, with fabulous western scenery in the background and your hair blowing away from your bald spot. Unless you’re Robert Bakker; that guy always wears a hat.” I looked around. “I don’t see him here.”

  Raymond’s eyes had taken on the slight glaze of someone doing some high-speed fact filing. “And George Dishey was a dinosaur paleontologist,” he said.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “Specialized in carnivores,” said Earthworm Magritte.

  I spun around. He was right behind me.

  He said, “Carnivores—that’s where the really big money is.”

  Raymond’s eyes snapped toward him.

  Magritte said, “It’s not just the books and T-shirts and the lunch boxes and the little plastic action models you get with your burger at McDonald’s. Dinosaurs themselves are worth a lot of money. The bones. It used to be potsherds; now it’s dino bones. Everybody wants some for their museum, or coffee table, or maybe slabbed open to use as bookends.”

  A bit unhinged to find him behind me like that, I opened my big yap and said, “I suppose the Chinese think they’re a tonic when ground up and served just before—” I was about to say “sex.” My tongue was running away with me. It’s an arrogant little trap that always lurks about a step in front of fools like me who have trained our brains more fully than our wits. Worse yet, I was falling into it right in front of th
is police officer, this man who had been assigned to ride herd on me through this conference, this man who had the odd intimacy of thinking that I might be a murderess. There was an electricity to the moment, of standing there that close to a man who held that much potential power over my future, feeling the heat of his breath as he bent to hear me over the din of the room. I caught myself examining the way the soft fabric of his off-duty shirt draped the firm muscles of his chest. I caught the scent of maleness and good soap, imagined that I would feel a pleasant humidity in the cloth. I looked away. I had been showing off, trying to impress him. I was making an ass of myself. “I need to settle this business about my talk,” I said abruptly, and walked away.

  4

  WHEN I HAD AT LAST FULLY CONVINCED MYSELF THAT THE talk I had taken great pains to prepare was not going to occur, I set to work pumping people for information about George Dishey. I didn’t ask Officer Raymond if he wanted my help. I did not in fact care whether he wanted it or not. Beside the obvious reason of needing to get off the suspect list and on with my life, I knew that there would be no better time to pry into these other people’s lives than when they were still interested in mine.

  As I circulated through the crowd, sliding in and out of conversations with the astonished conferees, I watched Officer Raymond work. Something more than his good looks kept drawing my eyes to him. There was an intensity to him. His work was clearly important to him, more so than was called for by mere attention to detail and correctness, or by the ambition of wanting a promotion. He consumed each person just as he had consumed me when our eyes had finally met in the hospital. He seemed to be searching for something essential, something he craved. As I watched him, I thought, An appetite for truth is something I can understand.

  I worked through the obligatory gaggle of people who wanted to hear the scant nothing I knew about the murder of George Dishey. More important, they wanted to gush away about how shocking they found the situation, and speculate wildly about who might have done it. Smart money assured me it must have been a mugger, or some crazy from the hills, but just a few others wanted me to know that George was not universally liked, don’t ya know. These bolder souls would quickly catch on that Officer Raymond was listening a little too intently, suddenly realize that I was with him and not them, and clam up. The talkativeness that comes with a sudden shock like hearing that one of your colleagues has been kakked was beginning to wear off, and they were returning to a more normal, more wary state. I figured I’d have to wait until I returned the next day without my police escort to get down to any meaningful gossip. And by then I knew that, even if Detective Bert told me I was free to go, I would return. I was bitten. The chase was on, and I wanted to know which one of these sons of bitches had gotten hot enough to murder my manipulative, shit-stirring little host.