Digging For Trouble

by Linda Fairstein

  “No,” Ling said. “No, no one has hurt me.”

  “Have they threatened to hurt you?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Hmmm,” I said, trying to think through this odd situation. Had Ling really discovered fossils that announced an entire new species of dinosaur. “Did they steal something from you?”

  “No, they didn’t,” she said.

  “You know a theft would be a crime, right?” I said, staring at Ling’s nose, which hadn’t moved a fraction of an inch.

  “But there is no theft, Dev.” Ling looked at me for the first time since we had started talking.

  “This photograph that Steve has—the one that he’s making public tonight—did he take those fossils from you?” I asked. “Couldn’t they belong to you, if you asked the ranch owner, since you found them on private land?”

  “I can’t make you understand this, I guess,” Ling said, standing up and turning around, as though to leave. “You’re not really paleontologists—you’re just kids.”

  She really knew how to hurt a girl.

  Booker answered before I could think of a snappy reply. “Try me, Ling. Try explaining what you want to tell us to me. You withdrew from Yale—but you don’t want to go home—and you’d like a visa to stay here and go to school somewhere else?”

  “You don’t get it. All I want is Dev’s mother to help me.”

  “Give us a little bit more,” Booker said. “What do you think we don’t understand?”

  Ling stood her ground for a few moments, then opened up. “Steve Paulson’s a bully. Tell me, is that a crime?”

  Ling wasn’t using the word “bully” the way Teddy Roosevelt meant it. I hated bullies—I hated them in the school yard or the swimming pool or the playground or on a hillside in Montana.

  “I don’t think every kind of bullying is a crime,” I said, “but sometimes it is.”

  When my mother was a prosecutor, she had worked hard to make sure bullies who crossed the line could be punished. There were vicious cyberbullies who’d been arrested by the NYPD for online threats, and guys who harassed people in person, in subways and on the street. But sometimes it was just mean kids who were bullies—like a few girls at my school—and their bad behavior was beyond the power of the law.

  “What exactly did Steve do to you?” Booker asked. He was standing tall, as ready to back up Ling as he always was to stand by me.

  Ling was staring at the floor again.

  “I’ll call my mother,” I said. “I promise.”

  “Your friend Katie,” Ling said, in a voice barely above a whisper, “she actually made the most important discovery of the dig.”

  “Her clutch of eggs?” I said. “The Ditch?”

  “Yes.”

  “But Katie didn’t find an entire new species,” I said, stepping cautiously into a sensitive area. “You’re the one who discovered that.”

  “Actually, I’m ashamed of what I did,” Ling said.

  “Ashamed? You should be so proud of yourself,” I said. “This is no time to leave for home, Ling. You get to name the new species—the rare feathered duckbill dinosaur. We’ll have to find a way to get you a visa.”

  Ling burst into tears.

  “There’s no need to cry,” I said.

  Booker reached into his jeans pocket for some napkins leftover from lunch and handed them to Ling so she could wipe her eyes.

  “Do you remember those three bones that Katie found the very first afternoon?” I asked.

  She squinted at me and answered with a question. “Why are you asking me that?”

  “I think Steve and Chip thought they were impor-tant, too,” I said.

  I could see that Ling was frightened now. “I should never have agreed to meet with you,” she said, heading for the door. “Your mother will never be able to get what I need.”

  “Steve switched the bones on Katie, didn’t he?” I asked. “Or was it Chip who did that?”

  I bolted ahead of Ling and stood in her way. “Those three little bones are at the heart of all this, aren’t they?”

  Ling didn’t know which way to turn.

  “Katie and Dev had that feeling all along,” Booker said to Ling. “Don’t hold it in. Maybe we can stop Steve before he goes public with his photograph tonight.”

  Ling started crying again—sobbing this time. “Those three bones Katie found gave Steve Paulson exactly what he needed.”

  “Needed for what?” I asked. “Please tell me.”

  “We didn’t find a new species of dinosaur in Big Timber, Dev,” Ling said, wrapping her arms around me as I tried to comfort her. “It’s a hoax. Maybe the biggest dinosaur hoax in history!”

  “A hoax!” I said, pushing Ling back so I could see the expression on her face. “What?”

  “I got caught in the middle of this terrible trick—a fossil that’s really a phony—that Steve is trying to pass off as the real deal,” Ling said, looking from Booker’s face to mine with a desperate plea. “I had to withdraw from Yale. I have to leave. I won’t be safe here unless you and your mom can help me.”

  “I’ve never handled a hoax before,” I said. “But we’ve got to stop Steve before he causes any more harm.”

  32

  “Do you know where my mother is, Tapp?” I asked, pacing around the small room in the Swedish Cottage.

  “That’s one thing I always know, Dev.”

  “Can you put me through to her?”

  “She’s not picking up her phone. There’s a hostage situation at a bank in the West Village. The commissioner’s with the Hostage Squad now.”

  “How about Sam?” I asked.

  “He’s right in the middle of things, too,” Sergeant Tapply said. “Since when won’t I do?”

  “You’ll do fine. You just need to tell my mom to call me as soon as possible.”

  “Is everything all right, Dev?” Tapp asked.

  “Under control at the moment, but Booker and I are going to need her help,” I said, looking over at Ling, who had taken a seat on the side of the room. “And tell her my friend Ling needs some guidance for renewing her visa. Like tomorrow.”

  Ling picked her head up and smiled at me.

  “You and Detective Dibble need backup, Dev?” Tapp asked. “Is it urgent?”

  “We’re good at the moment,” I said. “We’re in the Marionette Theatre inside Central Park.”

  “Don’t get yourselves tied up in any puppet strings, young lady,” Tapp said, chuckling at me, which probably wasn’t his best response option. “What’s the offense?”

  “We’ve been hoaxed, Tapp. It’s a pretty serious thing. Booker and I are working with the vic. If I need you to find me a crime, I’ll get back to you with the facts.”

  “And I’ll see the commissioner gets your message.”

  “Did you hear that, Ling?” I asked. “The man I was talking to is my professional lifeline to my mom. She’s in the middle of a case right now, but she’ll call as soon as she gets a break.”

  “Thank you both so much. I will be so grateful to meet her.”

  “Do you feel better now?” Booker asked.

  Ling nodded her head.

  “Where do you want to start, Ling? You need to tell Booker and me the story.”

  We had drawn three chairs together and waited till Ling looked comfortable and seemed secure enough to talk with us.

  “I met Steve Paulson at a conference in Washington, DC, last winter,” she said. “It was at the beginning of my second semester at Yale. It was only for about fifty or sixty scientists and was entitled ‘Dinosaurs Among Us.’ Also people like Steve, who don’t have advanced degrees but have done a lot of work in the field, were invited to attend, too.”

  “How did you find each other, exactly?”

  “I think it was the secon
d day of the conference, after I delivered a paper in a small seminar room.”

  “You did? You gave a talk at a convention for paleontologists?” I asked. “That’s really impressive.”

  “I was very honored to do it,” Ling said.

  “What was your topic?” Booker asked.

  “It was basically about the dig I had trained on in the Gobi Desert. It was a description of what we did there, and a PowerPoint with all the pictures I had taken and the fossils that we found.”

  “You told Katie and me about your Gobi trip the night we met you,” I said.

  “Well, Steve was really excited to find someone who had actually participated and who could tell him more about the project,” Ling said. “He flattered me so much that I should have thought twice about his interest, but then it’s really only paleontologists who are into the Gobi stories.”

  “Count me in,” Booker said. “Dev told me you were at the Flaming Cliffs.”

  “Yes, I was,” she said. “It’s an amazing place. So Steve took me to lunch and we traded stories—he told me about the dig for the Titanosaur in Patagonia and I talked about the Gobi.”

  “Was he curious about anything in particular?”

  “At first,” Ling said, “he was mostly interested in the state of paleontology in China.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Is something special going on there?”

  “I wouldn’t call it special,” Ling said. “I’d call it a good place for your mother to send some of her detectives.”

  My ears perked up at that remark. “Detectives? For what kind of crime?”

  “I think I need to explain how different things are in my country,” Ling said. “Most of the time, in China, it’s not scientists or students who dig up fossils.”

  “How come?”

  “We have some provinces in the northeast which are badlands, too. Lakes and marshes, where there were once a lot of volcanic eruptions, which are so good for preserving the ancient bones,” she said, calming now as she spoke. “But that part of our country is so poor that many of our farmers are the ones who are collecting the specimens.”

  “Are the farmers trained?” Booker asked.

  “Not at all. But they know they can make a lot of money—tens of thousands of dollars—by turning over the dinosaur fossils to private dealers.”

  “That’s called the black market, isn’t it?” I asked. “What the farmer is doing is basically illegal.”

  “Completely so, but very hard to police in our remote provinces.”

  “That’s crazy,” I said. “No wonder you could use my mom’s detectives.”

  “What’s especially wrong is that when they make discoveries, the farmers destroy a lot of the scientific information that we need,” Ling said. “If we can’t document the location and the layers of rock from which the bones came, then we really can’t be precise about their age, or how valid they are.”

  “I think I understand that,” I said. “You guys were all so careful with every step of the dig.”

  “I get it, too,” Booker said, pointing to a far corner of the room. “Like if I find a tooth over there, and then another bone in the next room, but I can’t prove to you where I found them . . .”

  Ling was nodding her head in agreement, this time with a smile. “You’ve got it, Booker. Then I can’t really make a claim that they are from the same animal when I study them. The dinos from which they each came might have lived a million years apart in time, even though they were discovered on the very same farm in China.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “That would make it really hard for you to prove things well enough to go to a museum, or a professional publication.”

  “Very hard to prove for those purposes.”

  “And that’s what interested Steve?” I asked.

  “I thought so at first,” Ling said as the smile faded from her face. “But it was more sinister than that.”

  The lights in the small room flickered and I heard the roll of thunder way off in the distance.

  Ling shuddered and looked up at the light fixtures.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s just weather. What did Steve want?”

  “I didn’t know at the time. In fact, I didn’t know until he hired me for the dig and we reached Big Timber,” Ling said. “But it was all about something that happened in China almost twenty years ago.”

  My mom always reminded me that when you’re twelve, twenty years seems like an eternity. If you told me that woolly mammoths roamed the Earth twenty years ago, how was I supposed to know anything different? But I couldn’t imagine how what Steve was interested in could affect Ling.

  “So it was about a fossil that was stolen from China and sold on the black market?” I asked.

  “No. That’s what Steve wanted me to think he was interested in,” Ling said as sheets of rain pounded against the windows of the cottage. “He had me totally convinced he was hiring me for the integrity of the scientific part of the dig.”

  “But that wasn’t it?” I said.

  “No, he was just using me. Like one of the puppets in the theater. All Steve wanted to do was pull my strings and control me.”

  “That’s not your fault,” Booker said, patting her on the knee. “Even Pinocchio was a good kid who got swept up in bad company.”

  “To do what?” I asked, stepping over to close the window so the rain didn’t soak the cottage floor. “What did Steve want you to do, in particular?”

  “He needed me to read all the scientific papers that were published twenty years ago, in Chinese,” Ling said. “After all, it’s my first language.”

  “What were the articles about?”

  “They were about one of the famous men who had pioneered discoveries in the Gobi Desert that teamed up with bone diggers from China to photograph and write about the find of a very rare feathered dinosaur in a province way out in our badlands,” Ling said.

  “A feathered dinosaur,” I said, “just like your discovery in Montana.”

  Ling looked ready to cry again.

  “Don’t be upset,” I said. “It was meant to be a compliment.”

  “What you need to understand, is that when the article about the Chinese flying dinosaur was published in your National Geographic magazine, twenty years ago,” Ling said, “an American scientist was able to prove that the entire thing was a hoax. The amazing Chinese fossil had been faked, Dev.”

  “Faked? And they got as far as publishing an article about it in National Geographic?” I asked, thinking of the image that was about to go online in the New York Times. “They must have fooled an awful lot of smart people to get to that point.”

  Ling nodded her head. “Oh yes, they were very good at what they did.”

  “A faked fossil,” Booker said. “But how did the bad guys do it?”

  Ling was biting the nails on her right hand. “The Chinese paleontologists, who wanted to become famous around the world, used the legs of a tiny dinosaur—a juvenile, which was pretty rare in itself—and they attached those bones to the bones of another fossil, an entirely separate species—”

  I couldn’t stop myself from interrupting Ling.

  “I bet the other body part of the fake was a tailbone,” I said, thinking of Katie’s find. It would be a natural part of the animal to attach to a fossil leg. It would explain why Katie’s bones were stolen by Steve and Chip.

  “That’s it, Dev,” she said.

  “So the photograph that the Chinese released twenty years ago was just a cut-and-paste, not a real specimen?” I asked.

  “It was artificially made from two different species, Dev,” Ling said, looking up at me. “It was just a cut-and-paste—not the least bit real or rare—to try to fool the entire scientific community.”

  Booker snapped his fingers. “Just like Steve’s about to do.”

/>   “But the tools we have for testing fossils now are so much better. Won’t everyone know it’s a fake?” I asked.

  “Not before Steve makes his fortune and moves on to the next dig,” Ling replied.

  “We’ve got to stop him,” I said, “before that photograph goes viral tonight.”

  “If Steve is faking these fossils,” Booker said, “then the photograph he’s giving to the newspapers is actually a forgery.”

  “Good thinking,” I said.

  “Forgery’s a crime, Ling. It’s right there in black-and-white in our Penal Law. I’m certain that the police commissioner will have something to say about this after all.”

  33

  “Hey, Tapp?” I said, standing at the door of the cottage, looking out, hoping the rain would let up a bit. “Is my mom okay?”

  “All clear at the bank,” he said. “Everyone is safe and sound. If your mother hasn’t called you yet it’s just because she’s briefing the mayor on how the hostage situation unfolded.”

  “Thanks so much. That’s a relief,” I said.

  I worried about my mother’s safety a lot. Sometimes I let it get in the way of my sleuthing. There was nobody in the world more important to me than my mom.

  “The commissioner’s a real pro, Dev.”

  “Oh, Tapp? If she gets to you before she calls me, will you please tell her that Booker and I are going over to the museum.”

  “Natural History?”

  “Yep,” I said. “We’ll be in the dino lab trying to stop a first class hoaxer.”

  Tapp laughed. I hadn’t meant to panic him, but I sure did want to be taken seriously.

  “Get up to speed on your Penal Law, Sarge,” I said. “Print out the section that defines forgery.”

  “I thought your specialty was theft, Detective Quick,” Tapp said.

  “You know how it is. You go where the evidence takes you.”

  “You want me to send some backup now?” Tapp asked.

  “My mother and Sam will have us covered. Till then, it’s just a bunch of us paleontologists having a tiff over creatures that died millions of years ago.”