Digging For Trouble

by Linda Fairstein

  “Fingers crossed, then, Booker,” I said, turning to him and holding both hands in the air. We were hoping for clues that the fossils were actually from the same animal and that they actually belonged together. “Fingers and toes, okay?”

  Harry worked the controls as I fidgeted behind him. Booker was sitting in a chair at Harry’s desk, playing a game on his phone.

  “What’s taking so long?” I asked, after fifteen minutes had passed.

  “I’m shooting photographs, Dev. X-rays,” Harry said. “CT scans are sophisticated X-rays—think of them that way. Thousands of them. Are you always this impatient?”

  “I think that’s a result of her name,” Booker said, without looking up from the screen. “When she races at a swim meet, her team cheers her on by shouting ‘Quick-er, Quick-er.’”

  “Well, another five minutes and I’ll be done, Dev.”

  I sent a text to Liza. “¡Hola, mi amiga! Did your mom find out anything about Steve Paulson?”

  I doubted she’d answer right away, so I e-mailed several other friends until I heard Harry turn off his machine.

  “Done?”

  “As much as I can do, Dev.”

  He opened the door to the scanning room and pressed the button that slowly ejected the bed on which the fossils were resting.

  “Okay if I wrap them up?” I asked.

  “All yours.”

  I carefully replaced the three bones in their safe packaging while Harry went back to his office. When I rejoined him, he had taken Booker’s place at the desk.

  “What did you learn, Harry?” I asked.

  He was printing out the results of the scan. Somehow, all the jumbled slices and slivers of the fossils were coming into focus as super-sophisticated X-ray images of Katie’s discovery.

  “You know how it goes, Dev,” Harry said, leaning in to study the photograph. “The tech can’t give the patient a diagnosis. We have to wait for the doctor.”

  “But, Harry,” Booker said, “we need an answer now.”

  “Besides, I’m not the patient,” I said. “The dino’s been dead for millions of years and Aunt Janice was never his doc.”

  “Okay, okay!” Harry said, holding both arms up in the air. “I just don’t want to get in the middle of a battle here.” “Booker and I aren’t fighting over this,” I said.

  “Well, someone’s not being straight with you,” Harry said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, leaning in to look over his shoulder at the image he’d produced. “What are you talking about?”

  I didn’t know the first thing about reading a scan. The bones looked just like they had the first time I saw them out in Big Timber, only now with that X-ray look of a Halloween costume.

  “You and Katie were told these were foot bones?” Harry asked.

  “Yes. See that shape on the end?” I asked. “Everyone told us that was sort of a socket that connected these pieces to the next part of the dinosaur’s leg.”

  Harry groaned and moved his head from side to side.

  Booker put down his phone and crowded in next to me. “What’s going on?”

  Harry split his computer screen and brought up another scanned image to the right of the one we were looking at. “So this is a scan of a part of the body of a human being, from a reference book I use.”

  I looked from left to right. The shapes of all the objects—Katie’s fossils and this sample scan—were pretty much the same. “What’s your point?”

  He picked up a pencil and pointed the tip of it at one of the dino fossils. “That socket you’re talking about doesn’t look like part of a super-duck foot at all. Whoever told Katie this was a foot bone was either badly mistaken—maybe an amateur in the field—”

  “Katie and Kyle and I were the only amateurs at the dig,” I said. “Everyone else was pretty savvy on dinosaurs.”

  “Then maybe,” he said, turning his head to look me in the eye, “maybe someone was lying to Katie.”

  “What about?” I asked.

  “Why would anyone lie about a dinosaur fossil?” Booker asked. “I’ve got to hand it to you, Dev. You’ve been suspicious about the way Katie’s bones were handled from the beginning.”

  “Too early for kudos,” I said to Booker, staring at the screen, feeling a sudden chill. I heard Harry say the word “lying” and goose bumps ran up and down my arms. “We’ve got so much to figure out here.”

  “So if these aren’t foot bones, what are they?”

  Harry moved the pencil to the right, to the scan of human bones. He started to describe the lines and cracks and marks revealed on the interior of the fossils by his scan. “I’m willing to bet you have pieces of the tailbone here, Dev. Parts of a dinosaur’s tailbone.”

  “Tailbone, foot, femur—what difference would it make?” I said, turning away from the scan. “We owe you for doing this, Harry, but I guess now we need a paleontologist.”

  I thought about it, then snapped my fingers and turned back to the screen. My goose bumps were growing by the second.

  “Because the tailbone is way more valuable than a piece of the dinosaur’s foot,” I said.

  “Why’s that?” Booker said.

  “It’s like teeth,” I said. “Teeth and tailbones can help you identify a species. A little fossil in the foot isn’t enough to prove something like that.”

  “Is Dev right, Harry?” Booker asked.

  “In humans,” Harry said, “that’s the last vestige of where a tail used to be, right at the bottom of the spine. So look how similar the shape of our tailbones are to the ones Katie found. Could be Dev’s got a point.”

  “I’m telling you, Booker,” I said, picking up my package and placing it in my cross-body bag, “I smell a rat in the middle of all these lizards.”

  “But why would those bone diggers in Big Timber want to hide a fossil that could identify a new kind of dino?” he said.

  My brain was in motion and all my wheels were spinning.

  “I’m working on an answer for us,” I said. “I really am. The only thing I know about those guys is that I think they’d lie to us faster than you can say Titanosaur.”

  28

  “Now what?” Booker asked, on our way out of his mother’s office. “You’ve got to get Katie’s fossils back into the museum before anyone figures out they’re missing.”

  “Understood,” I said, checking my e-mails for word from Liza. “This might be the time to confront Steve anyway, now that I’ve got a copy of our CT scan.”

  “You’re going to admit to him that you stole—I mean borrowed—the bones?”

  “I don’t see any need to do that.”

  “Then how do you plan to—?”

  “First we call upstairs,” I said as we started to walk north in the direction of the museum, “and I ask Steve if he’ll talk to me.”

  “He didn’t seem any too happy to see you on Friday, Dev.”

  “Now I’ve got evidence, Booker. The tide has turned.” That was one of Sam’s favorite expressions. If it worked for him in his developing investigations, I’d make it work for me.

  “What evidence? If you tell him about the CT scan, he’ll know you took the bones, and then he could make real trouble for you—for us—with your mother.”

  “Didn’t you see me taking photographs of Katie’s fossils before Harry scanned them?” I asked. “Steve won’t have any way of knowing if I took those when we found them out west, or today.”

  “So you think he’ll talk to you?”

  “Yup,” I said. “And while he does—while I keep him busy—you’ll slip the bones back on the shelf where you found them.”

  “Seems risky to me, Dev.”

  “We’ll be together,” I said. “Totally together in the same room. Do you really think what detectives do every day doesn’t have risks? We’ll
just be talking to a paleontologist in a laboratory inside the world’s most famous museum, surrounded on all sides by security guards.”

  “I’d feel a whole lot better if Liza’s mom had come up with some information about your guy.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “Why don’t you shoot Liza a text right now? She’ll get back to you pronto, I’m sure. She’s so into you.”

  “Stop joking around, Dev.”

  We stopped at the next light and Booker sent off his greeting to Liza with our question, pressing her for an answer.

  We crossed the street and I could feel my phone vibrating in my pocket.

  “Mom?” I said, seeing her number pop up as I went to answer the phone. “Is everything okay?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Where are you?”

  “Right now? I’m on the West Side, hanging out with Booker.”

  “That’s good. What are you two going to do?”

  “So funny you should ask that, Mom,” I said. “We’re just in the middle of making some plans right now. We haven’t quite figured it out yet.”

  Booker smiled and gave me two thumbs-up.

  “Don’t get caught in the thunderstorm this afternoon,” my mother said. “At least that’s what they’re predicting. I’ll treat you both to a movie at the multiplex on Broadway if you can’t hit tennis balls with him.”

  “Thanks, Mom. Good idea.” I didn’t think Booker and I would need shelter from the storm if we were fortunate enough to get into the paleontology lab, but it was always good to have a backup plan.

  “I just wanted you to know that Sheriff Brackley returned my call,” she said.

  “He did?” I said, jumping up and down in place. “Is it about Chip Donner?”

  “It is, young lady.”

  “Let me put my cell on speakerphone so Booker can hear, too.”

  “I want you both to hear me,” my mother said. “Loud and clear.”

  I didn’t know if the frosty tone of her voice was Chip Donner’s misfortune or mine.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Did he steal a tractor?”

  “What have I told you over and over again about keeping an open mind, Dev?” my mother said. “Chip was charged with taking a drift boat.”

  “A drift what?” I asked. “What kind of tractor is that?”

  “I didn’t say anything about a tractor. It’s a boat,” she went on. “It’s the kind of boat fly-fishermen use on the rivers in Montana.”

  One thing I knew was that there were no boats on a dinosaur dig.

  “But Tapp told me the guy was charged with stealing a motor vehicle,” I said.

  “It would seem that motor vehicles have a broader definition in Big Sky Country than in New York,” my mother said. “Drift boats gliding down the rivers of Montana don’t even have motors. And furthermore, Dev, the sheriff told me that the charges will be dismissed on the next court date.”

  “Bummer!” I said. “Why’s that? Because a drift boat isn’t a motor vehicle?”

  “Because Mr. Donner apparently did not steal the boat,” my mother said. “He’s not guilty of any crime. It seems some kids took the vehicle out on the river for a joyride and abandoned it on the Donner property.”

  “So I guess we’re still looking for an Atlas Road Warrior in Big Timber,” Booker said, “and someone who used it to trespass on the site.”

  “That, and you shouldn’t have jumped to any conclusions about Mr. Donner, kids. Now get on your way and skip the street vendors with hot dogs for a change today. Get some yogurt and fruit, or something healthy for you.”

  “Love you, Mom,” I said, kissing my phone so she could hear the sound of my smack. “Thanks for tracking that down for me.”

  Booker and I continued to trudge our way toward the museum.

  “So you think that eliminates Chip as a suspect?” he asked.

  “I know I’m supposed to give him the benefit of the doubt, but it was actually Chip Donner who swapped out Katie’s bones,” I said. “He just grabbed them away from her.”

  “Then we’ll have to talk to him, too,” Booker said.

  “You’ve got to be thorough in this game. No stone left unturned.”

  We stopped in front of the museum to check our e-mails before going inside. “Look at this, Dev,” Booker said.

  He seemed excited as he passed his phone to me. He had received a reply text from Liza de Lucena.

  I opened it and skimmed the personal part—how happy she was to hear from him and all that—and went right to the heart of it.

  “My mom’s made some calls to people she knows at the museum in Patagonia,” Liza wrote, “but no one has ever heard of your Steve Paulson. We’ve both searched online for articles about the great dig, but same thing—there’s no mention of Mr. Paulson or any wrongdoing. It looks like terminated just has the general meaning that it does in Spanish. If he was actually working on the project about the Titanosaur, then the dig finally came to an end.”

  I bit my lip and handed Booker’s phone back to him.

  “Not what you wanted to hear?” he asked, looking down at it.

  “I guess my mom is right. We have to go where the evidence takes us, and so far we’ve only got a bunch of dead ends. My hunches are usually better than this.”

  “How about lunch?” Booker asked as I started to climb the museum steps. “How about we take a break now?”

  “We’re on a search for the truth, Booker Dibble,” I said. “And that’s not a 23/7 kind of job.”

  29

  “Hello again,” Booker said, working his smile on Zora Berke, the security guard he had charmed on Friday.

  “How are you?” she said, returning the warm greeting.

  “Have you seen Mr. Paulson today?” he asked.

  I was taking the cross-body bag from around my neck and putting it over Booker’s head.

  “Those new people working in the lab?” she asked. “I don’t know them by name yet. But if you do, young man, and they’re expecting you, you just go right on up.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Courtesy, as Lulu reminded me all the time, takes you a good long way in life.

  I removed the catch that held one end of the velvet rope in place and reclosed it after Booker joined me on the staircase that led up to the fifth floor. I was beginning to feel quite at home in the museum.

  We made our way—this time with much greater confidence—through the windowed turret and partway down the hall to the small lab room.

  The door was closed, so I knocked.

  “Come on in,” a man said. I recognized Steve Paulson’s voice.

  “It’s just me, Steve,” I said, taking a deep breath and stepping into the long narrow room.

  He looked up from the documents he was studying, his back to the worktable and to the shelves to our right, from which Booker had retrieved the bones.

  “You’re making a regular nuisance of yourself, Dev, aren’t you?” he said.

  “Sorry about that. I really don’t mean to be a pain. I’m so interested in everything you taught Katie and me that I thought I could write a paper for school about her discovery.”

  I had no trouble keeping his attention focused on me. I had that surefire way of getting under people’s skin, like my mother often said, and maybe he thought by staring me down he’d get rid of me.

  “I thought Katie was going to do that for her science class.”

  Booker was slowly making his way down the row of shelves on the opposite side of the worktable. He appeared to be giving the fossils a casual browse.

  “I think you know I adore Katie, Steve,” I said, “but the truth is, we have different science teachers, and well, I’m a little better than she is at creative writing and—”

  “Somehow, that fact doesn’t surprise me,” Steve said. “Th
e creative part, I mean.”

  “Thanks for the compliment, sir,” I said, even though I knew that praising me was not his intention. In fact, it was pretty snarky of him. “I can tell a really fantastic story about the dig if I just had a few minutes more of your time.”

  “Why don’t you wait until I publish my own paper on these findings, Dev?” Steve asked. “Then I’ll give you all the help you need.”

  “When would that be, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Booker’s hand reaching into the bag and coming out with the little pouch containing the bones. I had to keep needling Steve Paulson so Booker had a clear shot at replacing them.

  “Another couple of weeks before I finish writing the whole thing up,” he said. “But you can follow the first story in tomorrow’s New York Times.”

  “That’s beyond awesome, Steve,” I said, stepping closer to look at the papers in front of him. “Even though you’re not done with your essay?”

  “It’s a photograph, actually. Just a teaser for news of our discovery.”

  Steve’s instinct for bragging seemed to outweigh my ability to annoy him.

  “This picture?” I asked, keeping him focused on me while Booker got the job done. I tried to eyeball it but Steve moved it away from me.

  “Tuesday’s Science Times,” Booker said, walking around the end of the worktable to stand on the other side of Steve, as though taking that path had been what he’d planned to do all along. “That’s my favorite section of the week. May I see your photo?”

  Steve ignored me and picked up the piece of paper with the Xeroxed copy of the photograph to show it to Booker.

  Booker held it up and studied it. “I guess I’d have to be a dinosaur expert to know what’s so special about this,” Booker said.

  “Let me have a look,” I said, removing my phone from my pocket with my right hand and reaching for the paper with my left.

  “By expert, Dev, I think your buddy is referring to me,” Steve said, taking the paper back.

  “I know that. I just wanted to look at it. To see what’s so special about it,” I said.