Bone Hunter Page 9

  I turned back to Allison Lee. “Do you know, ah, Dr. Magritte at all?”

  “Worm? Everybody knows him.”

  “A bit outspoken, is he?”

  Allison shifted nervously in her seat. “Listen, the Worm’s just another drug-related tragedy from the seventies. I mean, he’s a good guy, right? And so he’s a bit rough around the edges. Who cares? Everyone gets so worked up. It just makes me sick.”

  “But I mean, he—”

  “Listen, Magritte’s okay. Look, here’s his business card.” She fished a card out of her pocket, sorting it from a collection of twenty or thirty she must have garnered that morning from friends visiting her booth. It read:

  EARTHWORM MAGRITTE, PH.D.

  PROFESSIONAL SHIT STIRRER

  Egos trimmed Paradigms shifted

  Dirt dumped Errors illuminated

  Banality noticed Astral planes torqued

  “See?” she said. “You can’t take anything he says too seriously.”

  “Oh. But—”

  Allison had had enough of me. She narrowed her eyes and went on the offensive. “So who was the beefcake you were here with yesterday?” she began. “Please tell me he’s your brother. I mean, what a looker!”

  I was saved from having to volley her question when she turned to a skinny man with a drooping mustache who was just walking up. “Hi, Fred. How’s tricks? You wanna hear my spiel about trackways?”

  I drifted away from Allison’s poster session, hoping to put a nice, big easel between myself and the unrelenting stare of Earthworm Magritte under whose gaze I was beginning to feel naked. I moved a couple of aisles down and pretended to peruse a display entitled “The Histological Quantification of Growth Rates in Plated Dinosaurs,” but I soon found that Earthworm Magritte had trended that direction as well, and that he still appeared to find me more interesting than the posters. I didn’t like being observed, not one bit. There was something anomalous about the man, something too far out of the ordinary to be quite sane. Professional shit stirrer, indeed. Was he the stuff of murder?

  “You into thyreophorans?” someone asked. I turned. A tall, dark-eyed man with short salt-and-pepper hair was standing quite near me, lounging with his hands in his pockets. Though easily in his fifties, he had the trim, sinewy build of a man who has systematically kept himself in shape. “Enjoying the sessions?” he asked. It was the first time at this conference that somebody had taken the trouble to speak to me before I had first spoken.

  “Sure. Great,” I said as I quickly scanned his face, then dropped my gaze to read his name badge. Tom Latimer, it said. No university affiliation, just the town, somewhere in Illinois. I had noticed quite a few people with no affiliations, so that wasn’t strange in itself, but there was something odd about this guy. What?

  “Are armored dinosaurs your specialty?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Oh? What is?”

  “Stratigraphy. I’m just visiting from the oil patch.” I was immediately sorry I’d said so much about myself. This man made me uncomfortable. Why was that?

  “I see. Meeting some interesting people?” he asked casually. A little too casually.

  “Sure.”

  The man continued to look at me. I looked at him. Neither of us said anything for a moment. Out of nervousness, I asked, “So what’s your specialty?”

  “I’m an illustrator. I do dinosaur illustrations for kids’ books.”

  “Oh.” I let the volley of questions drop on my side of the net, hoping he’d just walk away, but he didn’t. He seemed to be waiting, and I wasn’t sure for what. I’d been to conferences and conventions before, and had been hit on more than once; yeah, even a plain Jane like me. There are a lot more men than women in the geosciences, and youngish unattached females are considered premium game for convention funsies. But much as this man’s opening lines were typical of that kind of hit, there was something in his eyes that didn’t seem quite amorous. Or friendly. Not unfriendly, exactly, but let’s just say I didn’t get the buzz that he was trying to get sociable for sociability’s sake. My stomach began to tighten. I smiled coolly, said, “Excuse me,” turned, and headed straight for the exit of the tent.

  I marched through the rain to the next building, which I knew housed the exhibits portion of the conference. Ray fell in thirty feet behind me as I searched out the exhibits room and found it. Inside, there were rows of tables with bored-looking vendors sitting behind them. The tables were stacked with flyers, pictures, technical widgets of interest to paleontologists, scientific texts, antique monographs, lavishly painted illustrations of dinosaurs, even sculptures. I wondered if this was the kind of work Tom Latimer did, but I couldn’t feature him sitting at an easel. I studied the men who sat behind the tables selling dinosaur art. They didn’t look much different from Latimer—same ordinary dress, same close haircut, but Latimer had seemed more … more what? More attuned to something other than dinosaurs.

  I wandered down the line of tables, taking in the wealth and variation of materials for sale. A cast of the skeleton of Utahraptor strode the carpet, horrifying claws poised for the kill, long balance-beam tail curving to accommodate her stride. A life-size reconstructed head of T. rex yawned at me from a wall like a trophy head from hell, its eight-inch teeth luring me in for dinner, its tiny eyes glassy with lust. Not for the first time, I wondered at man’s fascination with the terrible, the horrifying, and the immense.

  I came across one table that featured stacks of books by two paleontologists who were famous partly for the depth of their disagreement on each other’s interpretations of dinosaur behavior—Horner and Bakker, stacked right next to each other. I was wondering idly if the vendor was trying to start a friction fire when I found myself needing to scoot in closer to the table to let a man pass with his preschool-age son. They were a pleasant change from the overserious faces of the paleontologists, so I tracked the pair as they moved down the line of tables. When they reached an exhibit of special pastes used in preparing fossils for exhibits, the exhibitor grinned and leaned over his table to offer the kid a chunk of what looked like rock. “Here!” he said. “Want your own piece of dinosaur bone?”

  “Sure!” said the kid. He reached out and took it, eyes alight.

  The child’s father asked, “Is that real bone?”

  “Certainly,” said the exhibitor. “I have a bag full of bits like that.” He popped his eyes at the child. “It’s part of the neck frill from a Triceratops, sonny.”

  The father was as delighted as the child. “This is great,” he said. “The wife’s giving a paper here at the conference, and we just tagged along. I had no idea there’d be fun stuff like this for kids! What do you say to the nice man, Nate?”

  “Thank you!” the child sang.

  The father had one more question, the kind a man knows to ask if his wife is in the profession: “What locality did this fossil come from?”

  The exhibitor pointed down the room toward a man wearing an Australian-style hat with one side of the brim folded up. “You can ask him. That’s the guy who gave them to me.”

  The man with the hat had been strolling along the line of tables toward us with his hands in his pockets, looking at books. Just looking, not buying or even picking them up, as if he didn’t want to leave fingerprints. But when he heard himself mentioned, he stopped abruptly, turned, and ever so smoothly walked away and out the back door of the room.

  I turned to see if Ray had noticed the man, too. He had. I headed out the same door. The man was nowhere in sight. I moved quickly through the maze of hallways that wound through the building and found myself back outside.

  The man with the hat was talking to someone near the walkway that led uphill toward the Cliff Lodge. For the moment, it had stopped raining. I took a moment to gauge the man, trying to understand what his purpose might be in attending the conference. Was he some kind of vendor? He seemed better dressed than many of the other conferees, less intellectually distracted, and almost th
eatrical in his choice of western-style vest and Australian hat. He wore no name badge. The instant he saw me watching him, he broke off his conversation and headed up the path toward the Cliff Lodge, his stride quickly lengthening.

  I hurried to fall in beside him. “Enjoying the sessions?” I asked brightly, wishing I could think up a more sincere conversation starter than the illustrator with salt-and-pepper hair had unsuccessfully used on me.

  The man with the hat nodded noncommittally and further lengthened his stride. It was a steep path, his legs were considerably longer than mine, and he was clearly in shape and used to walking. When he was well ahead, I heard someone speak behind me. “He sure as hell isn’t going to talk to you,” the voice said.

  I turned, to find Vance, the weaselly little guy with the drooping blond mustache and broiled skin who had reported the problem with the poster tent to Sherbrooke the day before. “Why not?” I asked.

  “Commercial collector,” he sneered.

  I opened my mouth to ask him what a commercial collector was and why Vance thought one wouldn’t talk to me, but I was interrupted by a heavyset guy with a wiry beard who was converging on us from uphill. He was wearing a T-shirt that read ORNITHISCHIANS DID NOT HAVE CHEEKS. “Vance, you old ectotherm!” he boomed. “Haven’t seen you since undergrad. Whose fire you toasting marshmallows on these days?”

  I moved quickly out of range of Vance’s hissing reply. I wanted to stay well ahead of Officer Raymond, whose athletic grace was making the steep grade into flat ground, and I didn’t want to hear a piss-and-moan session about academic life. My brain was beginning to bog down from strain, lack of sleep, and a deepening sense of alienation. I had hoped in going there to feel like a colleague, or to at least feel like an accepted member of the geological scene, but I did not. People were avoiding me, and now even taking shots at me. What had I done to deserve such ostracism? Did they, like Officer Raymond, think I might have murdered one of their brethren? Or worse, did they lump me with George Dishey and presume I was a sloppy scientist? I wondered how long it would take to atone for my sin of foolishness and rid myself of that taint.

  I pushed those worries out of my mind, telling myself that there were more important things to concentrate on at the moment. I told myself also that there would be time enough to probe the tough little minds of Vance what’s-his-name and Allison Lee a little later on, after I had poured a cup of hot black coffee from the urns in the lobby outside the symposia under way at the Cliff Lodge. I was wrong.

  10

  I WAS JUST RAISING THAT CUP OF COFFEE TO MY LIPS WHEN Ray materialized at my elbow. Bam, like out of nowhere. I hadn’t seen him coming. Just like the night before, when the gun went off. I jumped, spilling coffee on one of the magnificent Persian carpets that were so lavishly strewn about the floor. I almost swore, then wanted to swear again when I realized that I had suppressed that curse out of the embarrassment of thinking Ray was somehow better than I was just because he went to church and didn’t cuss. Or I presumed he was a churchgoer. I sure as hell wasn’t.

  I turned toward him and fixed him with a glare I hoped would put him in his place, wherever that was, took a noisy suck at the coffee his religion forbade him to drink, and waited. The gesture was meant to say, How dare you presume to trot up to me whenever you wish?

  But the look on Ray’s face cut right through my bluster. His taut body muscles said alert, his face said urgent, and his eyes said now. He took the coffee cup out of my hand, set it down, clamped a hand on my arm, and turned me toward the escalators that led down to the main entrance. “We have to go,” he said.

  “Why?” I demanded.

  “I’ll tell you on the way.”

  “You’ll tell me now.”

  Ray glanced left and right to make certain he would not be overheard. “Someone’s already tried to get into your room at the motel,” he said. “If I’m going to keep you safe, this is not the place.” He had me moving now, in a beeline for the front doors. Suddenly, he jerked to a stop, his eyes wide.

  I looked where he was looking, out through the glass wall at the exquisitely manicured ski slopes, which now glowed with the soft richness that only thick clouds and rainwater can bring out of autumn foliage.

  “Below,” Ray said tersely.

  I lowered my gaze.

  Three tour buses had pulled up by the front entrance. Their doors were opening. People were climbing off, filling the driveway, now churning about, now opening the cargo doors, now raising placards that said GOD LOVES us! and DON’T INSULT OUR LORD! They swung the placards into position, turned with ominous quiet toward a hand raised by their leader.

  I said, “What the hell—”

  “Protesters,” said Ray. “We heard they might show up.” He changed course and steered me the opposite way, toward a flight of stairs that led to a side entrance.

  I jerked to a stop in a protest of my own. “Protesters? What in hell’s name would anyone want to protest about a paleontology convention? And wait!” I tugged my arm loose. “Damn it, Ray! Who are those people and who exactly is this ‘we’ who heard they might show up?”

  Ray tensed further as the sounds of chanting reverberated through the glass wall. “‘We’ is the police department. They are creationists. Now—”

  “Fundamentalist protesters? Really?” I gaped toward the windows, fascinated. “You mean … Oh, I get it. They think paleontologists are out to get them because they believe in evolution. What a crock!” Then it occurred to me that, as a Mormon, Ray might also be a creationist. Had I offended him? “So does ‘they’ also mean ‘not Mormon’?”

  Ray raised an eyebrow sardonically and tried again to steer me away from the window.

  I said, “Go? Just when things are getting interesting?”

  Ray replied by dropping my arm and putting a hand over his face.

  I was beginning to enjoy the way he said more with his body than with words; it was eloquent as well as extraordinarily sexy. I smiled at him, enjoying watching him just stand there looking exasperated. But then he took his hand away from his face and I could see that he had moved beyond annoyance to fear, and that fear shot straight into me. I had not wanted to hear what he had said about people trying to find their way into my motel room—I had wanted to think that that hadn’t made sense, that no one could know where to find me. But now my emotions cracked through the protective wall my intellect had built, and sheer terror roared in. It roared to the beat of the angry chanting that now flooded up the escalator well from the entrance below, and I whispered, “Why would anyone come looking for me? What do I know that could hurt anyone?”

  Ray reached his hand toward me, palm up, in supplication. “Why would anyone shoot at you last night? We can get out this side door,” he said, and added, now raising his voice to be heard over the chanting, “Please.”

  We hustled down a short flight of stairs toward the side exit, only to find that way jammed with protesters, too. We shot across the lobby, and fetched up against the doors that led into the ballrooms where the learned talks were being presented. As we ran, I saw Dan Sherbrooke striding toward the main entrance, a look of mystified outrage pasted across his face. He seemed querulous, as if thinking, How could anyone presume to assault this extension of my personal being in this way?

  Once again, I threw on the brakes. “Wait! Sherbrooke looks like he’s going to stir some shit here, and it might tell us something.”

  The protesters now packed the opposite end of the lobby, barring all other exits. They had ceased their advance, content to intimidate with their chanting and the sheer numbers of their presence.

  Ray opened the ballroom door and stared through to the far side. Satisfied that this provided us an exit through the kitchen doors, he held up an index finger and looked me in the eye. “One minute,” he said. “One.”

  The protesters now began to sing, borrowing their tune from an old children’s hymn and cramming in words that didn’t scan: “God created us, how do we know? Because t
he Bible tells us so!”

  Sherbrooke allowed them three verses and then raised one large pudgy hand. “Please!” he roared, “Ladies! Gentlemen! How may I help you?” His words were cordial, but his chin was raised in indignation.

  A television reporter squeezed past the head of the phalanx and popped in next to Sherbrooke, pulling her cameraman with her. Sherbrooke drew her deftly to one side, helping her set up her camera angle. There was a ponderousness and a courtesy in his motions that suggested that he might just possibly have already been acquainted with her, might, in fact, have known that she was coming. As she finished adjusting her jacket and got her microphone lined up, a man in a pale green suit strode inward from the head of the crowd, approaching the camera. “Brethren!” he boomed, raising a hand in saintly greeting. He turned dramatically, slowly, regarding the room from one far corner to the other, then finally turned back toward the camera and swung his hand over his heart. “Brethren, let us pray!”

  Sherbrooke drew his lips up so tightly that I could all but hear his anus pucker at the other end of his alimentary canal. He did not appear to like being upstaged.

  “Almighty God,” intoned the preacher, “lend Your light to us today that we might bring the grace and majesty of Your truth to those gathered in this palace of earthly delights. Lead them in Your wisdom and teaching, that they might find the true knowledge of Your Word and discover the joy of knowing that You created them. Help them find Jesus, that they might enter Thy kingdom. Amen.”

  “Amen,” murmured the protestors.

  As he suffered the affront of being prayed over, Sherbrooke drew himself up even taller. His large soft eyes glared out through his glasses like dark goldfish perceiving a horrifying world. I could almost hear the gears in his braincase hiss into smoother running as the heat of his anger thinned the viscosity of their oil.

  The preacher sucked in his breath to address him, but the reporter had already swung the microphone toward Sherbrooke.