The Dinosaur Heist

by K. B. Spangler

  “All right.” Chanda paused. “That makes a lot of sense. I… My mother met Josh a few years ago at her community center. I’m her primary tech support, but she goes to him when she’s got tech problems that I can’t solve. Yesterday, when I lost my data, I called her. Just… Rachel, I called her because she’s my mom. She couldn’t help, but she told me that Josh was in his office so I might as well drop by and ask him.”

  Rachel was peering at Chanda with the same intensity as before, but it only took her a moment to nod. “Good,” Rachel said to her. “That’s settled.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  “All right.” Chanda sounded suspicious. I couldn’t blame her: Rachel had snapped out of fighting mode as quickly as if Chanda had flipped a switch. “Can I ask why you were asking about China specifically?”

  “Nope,” Rachel said, and pointed towards Santino.

  Santino nodded to his partner, and then started talking. “You had two backup drives and your server, right?”

  Chanda nodded.

  “Well, someone knew where the backup drives were hidden. There was the one in the Regents’ Meeting Room, and the one in your boss’s office.”

  “Right,” Chanda agreed. “So?”

  “Someone stole those, and they also broke into your office. They knew exactly what they were looking for. How would they know what to look for, and what’s their motive?”

  “Honestly? I don’t know,” Chanda replied. “I do have some professional rivals at the Smithsonian. They aren’t nearly as security-conscious as I am. I was going to break into their computers tonight and look for my property.”

  “Well, that’s something you never said aloud in the presence of two cops,” Rachel said. “What are their names and positions?”

  I grinned to myself as I watched Rachel and Santino work. They were doing what they usually did when it came to interrogation: they pushed the conversation between each other, and pulled little scraps of useful information from the subject. After a few minutes, Rachel said, “Okay, that’s enough for now. Anything more will require you to file an official report, and I’d like to keep this informal for now.”

  “Why?” Chanda asked.

  Rachel was suddenly very busy adding more cream to her coffee, and Santino was occupied with searching his wallet for cash.

  “Rachel? Why?” Chanda leaned forward. “What am I missing here?”

  “Remember how the conversation began?” I asked her. “And what you just asked Rachel?”

  “With birds? Wait—” She caught herself. “They wanted to know if I’m involved with China.”

  “Duty calls. We’ll see you later,” Santino said, as he tossed a few bills onto the table. “Have a fun afternoon.”

  We said goodbye. Once they had vanished through the front door, Chanda turned to me. “What just happened?”

  “There are some things that the MPD shouldn’t get involved in,” I said, as I stood and pulled Chanda’s chair out for her. “One of them is the possible theft and sabotage of a federal worker’s illegally obtained project from a country under a highly disputed political occupation by another country. This could get very bad, very quickly. It’s up to all of us to make sure we keep it under control, Mrs. Leung included.”

  “Good lord, I actually followed that,” she muttered.

  “I’m so sorry.” I leaned over to kiss her on the cheek. “I’m a terrible influence.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  After that, we should have gone back to the museum.

  Rachel had told us that Jason had reported back to her, and he had found that Chanda’s server had been wiped clean. With Chanda’s extensive security procedures, that could only have been done if someone had broken into her office. Rachel and Santino were chasing down possible leads within the museum, mainly among Chanda’s coworkers. However, as this wasn’t an official case, the two of them couldn’t review security footage, or search the digital access logs, or do much more than poke the hornet’s nest and see what flew out.

  My job is people: I should have been the one standing behind them with the butterfly net.

  Except…

  Except it was Saturday, and nobody was there. At least, not in the warren of employee tunnels tucked beneath the building. The visitors’ areas of the museum were swarming with families, but the scientists and their respective assistants were gone, gone, gone.

  What to do, when the world is shut down for cleaning?

  As it turned out, Chanda had an appointment to keep.

  She bought bread. Good bread, expensive bread, the kind of bread lousy with seeds. Chanda spent fifty dollars on bread to give to the birds living in her yard, every single week, and I realized I loved her for it.

  We arrived at her house, which was swarming with both crows and children. Apparently, the Saturday afternoon feeding was a neighborhood event. Chanda brought out smocks for the children—“Birds poop, and parents make phone calls.”—threw a couple of old tea towels over her shoulders and mine, and opened the bags of bread.

  I can say without exaggeration that I’ve been in the middle of a feeding frenzy. It was an exceptionally polite frenzy, with Chanda’s sleek black birds plucking bits of bread from my hands instead of removing whole chunks of skin. I was beginning to understand what Chanda meant when she said that crows were highly intelligent animals. But, as a highly intelligent animal myself, I watched as the crows moved their sharp feet along the kids’ soft-skinned hands, leaving trails of pinpricks and light scratches. I saw beaks moving dangerously close to human eyeballs, and crows that fluttered anxiously when the children let out sudden screams of joy.

  I saw disaster waiting to happen.

  (Or, you know, a virulent case of bird flu.)

  Chanda saw the expression on my face, and elbowed me in the ribs. “It’ll be okay,” she promised. “The ladies love this.”

  They did, too. It was obvious the crows were having the time of their lives, or at least the time of their week. Each crow had a favorite child, and they made a crow’s equivalent of happy giggling sounds as the child crammed bread into their beaks.

  But…

  After a few minutes, I handed my tea towels to Chanda and went inside. It was under the pretext of using the bathroom, but she wasn’t fooled. The truth was, I wanted to flap my arms and shout and drive the birds away from the kids.

  There was no reason for it. Call it instinct if you want, and tell me I’m not as far removed from our marmot ancestors as I pretend to be. I simply wasn’t comfortable around those crows, and I couldn’t relax. Especially not with kids involved.

  Mentally, I knew that nothing would happen. Chanda would never expose these kids to anything dangerous. This was a different kind of community, and I should have thanked Chanda for introducing me to it.

  Physically and emotionally, I couldn’t be a part of it.

  I went to the kitchen and puttered around. Even after the window incident that morning, the kitchen was remarkably clean. The tape around the bottom of the plastic sheeting had come loose, so I took some time to repair it. Then, I made coffee, found the sugar, and kept forcing myself to keep from jumping each time a child shrieked.

  Nope. Wasn’t working. I took my coffee and moved into the living room to put some distance between myself and the inevitable liability incident report. There, I flopped down in one of the leather chairs, and leaned back to try and relax.

  That’s when I noticed Chanda’s network.

  The most interesting aspect about being a cyborg is that the implant in your head is basically another sense. Once you get used to it, you don’t think about it. It’s like your ears, your eyes, your skin… It processes information constantly, and you train yourself to ignore any data that doesn’t demand immediate attention. So while I had known that Chanda’s house was on its own network, there had been other things on my mind to distract me from exploring her machines.

  Now, I shut my eyes and listened to what they
had to tell me.

  Her home computers were similar to those at the museum, except these were on a broadband internet connection. She had set up firewalls galore: I respected her desire for privacy, so I stayed out of the guts of the machines. Instead, I meandered around the infrastructure, the connections, checking out how she had built the system and which parts went where—

  I sat bolt upright.

  When Chanda came inside carrying an armful of bird-spattered smocks, I was waiting in the kitchen. I must have looked like I had bottled up a lot of anger, as she froze.

  “What’s up?” she asked cautiously.

  “Do you have any of your work data stored here?’

  “Not really. Why?”

  “I think there’s a drive missing.”

  “What do you mean—No!” She threw the smocks on the counter, and rushed upstairs.

  I followed.

  Chanda ran down the hallway and into the room where her computer equipment lived. She had set up multiple desks, and these were covered in computer cases, printers, scanners, monitors...all the fluff and stuff that she’d need to work on her dinosaur modeling in the privacy of her own home.

  Except there was a hole in the center of one of the desks.

  “It was here!” she gasped. “I checked last night when we got home! It was here this morning!”

  “What was on it?” I asked.

  “All of my communications with my paleontologist colleagues,” she said, as she dropped to her knees and checked under the desk, just in case the hard drive had grown legs and scurried into hiding. “Including my friend in China. The ones I don’t keep on public servers because they might get her in trouble.”

  My anger grew. “Someone broke into your house.”

  “Oh God!” She stopped searching for the hard drive and slumped over. “They…they came into my house!”

  “I think so,” I said. “Give me your phone.”

  She handed it over, numb. I placed a call to 911, and then reached out to Rachel in the link.

  After a moment, she opened her end of our connection. “What?”

  “Someone broke into Chanda’s house and stole a hard drive.”

  Rachel paused as she felt my mood through her end of the link. “Calm down,” she said. “This is good. This is a minor crime, but it still allows me to get involved through official channels.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I replied. “But someone came into her house.”

  “That’s usually what a domestic B&E is. Oh, don’t bite my head off. I’ll talk to the office and Santino and I will be right over.” She snapped our connection shut before I could reply.

  I knelt beside Chanda on the floor.

  “This is a good thing,” I told her, even as I realized she was quietly crying. “This gives Rachel and Santino a lot more room to work, and now they can do it without pissing off the entire nation of China. They’re on their way over.”

  “It’s not good,” she said quietly. She was trembling. “Nothing about this is good.”

  “I know,” I replied, as I gathered her in my arms.

  “It’s real,” she said. “This is real now.”

  I knew what she meant. Someone breaking into her office and stealing her work was bad: someone breaking into her home and knowing exactly where she kept her correspondence was terrifying. “Who would know where you—”

  She shook her head to cut me off. “I can’t, Josh. Not yet. Give me a minute.”

  “Okay,” I said, as I held her. I couldn’t help her, not really. Chanda was doing her best to hold herself together. She wasn’t the type of person who allowed herself to break down, and as soon as those few tears were done, she’d be ready to start fighting again. I was completely useless in this situation, except for the fact that I was a big strong man who was good with a gun, and maybe that counted for something at a time like this.

  I held her until the crows burst into screeching outside the house.

  “They must be here,” she said, as she wiped her eyes.

  I reached out through the link to check. Chanda was right: Rachel’s GPS put her on the front porch.

  “C’mon,” Chanda said, her eyes dry and clear. “Let’s go make introductions so the ladies can learn they’re friends.”

  I mulled that over for a few moments. As we made our way downstairs, I asked, “What does that mean, about making introductions?”

  “I’ll go out there and show that Rachel and Santino are friends, and the ladies will remember them.”

  “They remember people?” I thought back to Travis and the broken window incident.

  “Crows can identify faces,” she said. “They don’t forget people, even if they haven’t seen them in years. They still scream at some of my neighbors, but only the ones they know I don’t like.”

  “Spooky animals,” I muttered.

  “My ladies are family,” she said, a small amount of heat finding its way into her words.

  “I know,” I replied. The banister under my hand had been polished smooth over the generations. “But you’ve got to admit, they’re still pretty spooky.”

  By the time we reached the front porch, Rachel was standing as still as a statue. She was surrounded by crows, crows everywhere, crows on the porch railings, on the light fixtures, on the benches, on the floor…

  All of which were staring at her.

  “Josh?” she said, as Chanda opened the door. “Little help?”

  Santino climbed the steps, another couple of crows perched on his shoulders. “These guys are great!” he told Chanda. “How much English do they speak? I told them we were here to see you, and they hopped on for a ride.”

  “They’ve got a large vocabulary,” Chanda said. “Ladies? This is Santino and Rachel.”

  The crows didn’t move. Except for the two on Santino’s shoulders, the flock kept staring at Rachel.

  “Weird,” Chanda said.

  “Yes,” Rachel replied, her voice suggesting she wasn’t just a statue, but a statue made of glacial ice. “Yes, it is.”

  “Josh, come here,” Chanda said. She took my hand and put it in Rachel’s. “Look, ladies, you like Josh. He’s friends with Rachel.”

  One of the crows cocked its head, and asked, in a very human-sounding voice: Ah?

  Ah! went another crow.

  Ah! Ah! said another.

  Ah! Ah! Ah! grunted the rest of the flock.

  Rachel turned to me, her face still utterly blank.

  “They’re mimics,” I explained.

  “You’ll notice I didn’t say a goddamned word.”

  “Okay, inside, quickly please,” Chanda said to us, as she shooed the crows away. “Go, ladies! You’ve already had your bread.”

  She showed Santino and Rachel to her office, and let them poke around at her equipment. After that, we ended up in the kitchen for coffee.

  “What happened here?” Rachel said, as she tugged at the plastic sheet over the window.

  “Travis happened,” Chanda replied.

  “Who’s Travis?” Santino asked.

  “An asshole who ran through my backyard and broke my window.”

  Rachel and I looked at each other.

  “There’s a hell of a coincidence,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “We need to go talk to Travis.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  That’s what we did next.

  Or, that’s what Chanda and I did, while Rachel and Santino went about the business of filing police reports and opening formal lines of inquiry. They didn’t want us to talk to Travis, but Chanda insisted he’d talk to her.

  She wasn’t wrong. I’ll gloss over the details of the meeting. The man was a waste of carbon who would have shamed our hard-working marmot ancestors. His bail hadn’t come in, so he was still in holding, and I convinced the officers to let us to have a brief chat. It didn’t go well, but at least it was over quickly: after he pressed his face to the glass and threatened Chanda, he let it slip that someone had paid him to hurl
a rock at her house.

  Who had paid him?

  Some dude.

  Any additional information about this “dude?”

  Look, it was just some dude, okay?

  The conversation concluded with Travis making fake drooling noises at Chanda again. As we left the station, she muttered, “I’m glad I got to kick him in the dick.”

  “A couple of times,” I replied. “Was he a one-night stand?”

  She shook her head. “Not even. Hookup in a bar bathroom.”

  I winced. “Oh, those go wrong so fast.”

  “Right?!” Chanda sighed. “It was halftime, and he looked good enough to eat, so…”

  “Yeah, I’ve been there. A lot. I never learn. Followed you home?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Jesus. I hate that.”

  We walked in silence, alone with our own thoughts for a little while. Then, I said, “The other night, when your crows were waiting for you on the porch? You said they hadn’t done that before.”

  “No,” Chanda said.

  “Would they do that if someone was sneaking around?”

  “Possibly,” she replied. “But the ladies usually freak out when strangers are around the house. They’re really protective.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I’m part of the flock. Besides, it’s their property, too. A threat to me might turn into a threat to them.”

  I nodded, thinking back to Travis and the window. By the time he had gotten close enough to break it, the crows had identified him as a threat and had begun swarming him. “What would happen if someone tried to break in?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve had some bad encounters with exes, but nobody has ever done anything more than smash a couple of windows, key my car, the usual stuff. The ladies get excited and run them off.”