Conard County Watch

by Rachel Lee

  Heaven.

  Chapter 13

  Cope rose just before dawn. Much as he didn’t want to climb out of the best nest he had ever enjoyed, he realized the beginning of the day could bring threats. Something wasn’t right on this mountain, and from long experience he knew he’d better at least have his boots on. Nothing could slow a guy down faster than having to run barefoot across rough ground.

  Moving as silently as he could, he dressed and carried his jacket outside. The fire was little more than glowing embers, the brightest thing in the predawn.

  After he pulled his jacket on, he headed for the stack of dried wood the team had been steadily collecting and built up the fire. He knew he could make coffee on the propane stove, but a little general warmth would be welcome, too.

  He wondered if the watcher he kept sensing on and off was enjoying his time hiding in the woods. Probably not. He wouldn’t dare build a fire or brew coffee, the fire because it could be seen for miles, and the coffee because the aroma would perfume the forest.

  Cope took a small amount of satisfaction in imagining the guy’s discomfort. He probably had to drive to town to...

  Cope had just been about to settle into a camp chair while the coffee perked when the thought struck him. He needed to call the sheriff. Somebody hanging around in town like this guy might have drawn attention.

  Unlike the rest of the county, Conard City wasn’t a place a stranger could disappear into. It wouldn’t be long before he’d be noticed and people would start wondering.

  Of course, he might not be a stranger. He might well be a local, hired to do something out here.

  But whose cockamamy idea had that screaming animal and the chanting been? Sure, it had unnerved the team last night, but it hadn’t unnerved Renee. Or him. So if he had wanted to clear the place out, he’d failed.

  The huge question still remained, though. Why should anyone give a damn?

  He picked up a stick to stir the fire a bit and told himself to stop chasing his tail. All would be revealed in good time. It always was. He just hoped it was revealed before anybody got hurt again.

  He wondered if the egg was still okay, and if maybe Renee would be willing to try to dig it out faster. He didn’t know why, but he was beginning to feel that time was short. Short for what, he didn’t know.

  He hated situations like this, where you couldn’t identify the enemy and, worse, didn’t know why there was an enemy to begin with. He could count on the fingers of one hand the events that made him feel someone wanted this dig shut down, but none of them added up to a clear picture he could work with.

  Man, it just might be some nut who had a thing against fossils. Maybe someone who believed that evolution never happened and that people really had once ridden dinosaurs. Or whatever. He wasn’t clear on that line of thinking.

  He could understand people not liking the idea of evolution, but being afraid of knowledge? If they pulled those fossils out and someone dated them to sixty-five million years in the past, it wouldn’t matter to those who believed the world was only six thousand years old. Evidence could be easily dismissed, especially if you didn’t understand the science behind it.

  Nor would that egg or anything else they’d found affect many people outside the paleontological world.

  But if they turned that rock wall itself into a protected historic site, or a museum... Well, he guessed that could chap someone’s hide, although he didn’t know if the tribe would approve any such thing on sacred ground.

  As far as he could see, anything Renee found probably would be shipped out. In its wake it would leave a bunch of tumbled rock that a few fossil hounds might want to pick through...if the tribe permitted it.

  So where was the hassle? It was apparently enough to make someone want to sabotage the team, but not enough to make them want to kill. Not yet, anyway.

  Weird.

  The coffee smelled ready so he got himself a cup and moved the pot farther from the heat. The sunrise was about to begin, one of those special sights where rays streamed outward from the sun, rather than a smear of pink and orange across high clouds. Must still be dust in the air.

  Just as the first sliver of sun, looking like molten gold, lifted above the distant horizon, Renee emerged from the tent. Fully clothed, including her jacket, she stretched widely, looked at the sun and said, “Wow.” Then she looked at Cope with an almost impish smile, adding, “And double wow.”

  He laughed and rose, going to give her a huge bear hug. “That’s triple for you, lady.” Then he kissed her long and deep, a reminder of all they had shared. Unfortunately, it awoke the male parts of him that he didn’t want aroused right now. Morning. People coming. Things to do.

  He released her reluctantly, feeling her hands slip from his back.

  “You can do that again anytime,” she said, her lips slightly swollen.

  “I’ll take you up on that offer. Come on, coffee’s ready, and when you’re ready I’ll rustle up some breakfast.”

  She took her camp chair and happily accepted the coffee he handed her. “You know what’s good?” she asked.

  “Tell me.”

  “Some of that instant hot chocolate in a cup of coffee.”

  “Sold,” he said immediately, and went rummaging around in the box of nonperishables. Soon he had both their cups topped with hot chocolate and the flavor, he decided, was a great idea.

  It was a time of day when parts of the world woke quickly, and other parts seemed to take their time. Birdsong had been issuing from some of the trees since first light, but now with the sunrise, the chorus grew bigger. The sun’s rising happened so rapidly when seen against the horizon that it was impossible to believe that it was the same sun that drifted across the daytime sky. Right now, it was almost possible to feel the earth spinning on its axis.

  Reaching out, he clasped Renee’s free hand and felt her squeeze back.

  “Any bright ideas this morning?” she asked.

  How quickly she returned to work. No mooning about, no discussion of the night before. He respected that about her. He’d been in enough tight places that he knew the importance of being able to shift gears quickly.

  “None,” he admitted. “There’s not enough to go on. I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone would care about this dig enough to cause problems. Clearly someone does, but I’m left wondering if it’s some juvenile who needs a little counseling, or something more worrisome.”

  “The slide,” she said.

  He nodded. “You’re right. There was nothing childish about that. There was certain intent. Whether it was vandalism or something worse, I can’t imagine.”

  “It isn’t adding up,” she agreed. “Nothing is. It doesn’t make sense to do things that seem designed to scare us off but not to hurt us. And that crazy chanting. I don’t care that it made everyone nervous—if that was supposed to drive me away, it missed the mark by a mile. Even that awful scream didn’t do that. Or the flute. It’s beginning to feel like a Halloween house of horrors designed for kids.”

  That was it exactly. But the point? He wished he could ferret out the point of all this. “You heard anything from Claudia?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing beyond that she had to take care of some business and would be out of pocket for a few days. Not long, she seemed to indicate. Why? Do you think she knows something?”

  “Knows? Not about this crap. Not yet anyway. Maybe she went on the vision quest with Gray Cloud.”

  “I hope they get some visions,” Renee muttered. Then, because she couldn’t do anything else, she sipped her chocolate coffee and watched the day’s birth.

  Cope sat there holding her hand, wishing he could carry her into the tent and hating the feeling that he was blind. In all, nothing that had happened seemed intended to seriously hurt anyone. But he had a growing feeling that if they didn’t clear out, som
eone would get hurt or killed.

  “I feel like a mouse being toyed with by a cat.”

  Renee’s head nearly jerked as she turned it toward him. “You, too? I didn’t want to say it because...” She bit her lip and with it bit back the ensuing words.

  Cope had no such qualms. “Because at the end of the game the mouse dies.”

  Her lips compressed. What could she say to that? She’d been trying all along to convince herself that no one meant any serious harm to her or her team, but as this dragged on, the stupid things that were happening were beginning to feel more like a warning. A serious warning.

  The sun was now high enough that looking at it could be dangerous. Like everything else around here, Cope thought. Benign at the outset and then...maybe not so benign. He couldn’t escape the feeling that they were simply waiting for a shoe to drop.

  “I think,” he said slowly, hoping he wasn’t about to tread on her feet but knowing that was the last thing he should worry about, “I think that we ought to get the team to stay away for a few days.”

  He felt her tense. The stiffness reached him right through their clasped hands. “Do you know how tight my schedule is? I’ve got to get an awful lot out of here before it starts snowing again. Given that this is Wyoming, before we know it it might be too cold to work anymore, snow or no snow.”

  He understood that. “I’m not trying to screw up your work schedule. I know you have deadlines to meet...for your grant, right? If you want it to be renewed so you can continue work next year and maybe save this site, you have to produce, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.” Her tone was short, sharp. “Photos won’t do it. Not at this point. We need to start releasing some important fossils from that ground, and not just the egg.”

  He twisted a little, trying to read her face. Unfortunately, it looked as if it was of a piece with that rock wall. Unrevealing. “Why isn’t the egg enough?”

  “Depends on what you’re looking for. The egg alone is a great find. It’ll come to rest in a museum somewhere if the tribe doesn’t want to shelter it in a museum of their own. But it’s the other fossils I need as much, for my theory, or it’s just another dinosaur egg, Cope.”

  He understood. But he also understood something else. “If we appear to send the team away for a while, then the problem will be partly solved for whoever is doing this. Only two people left to deal with.”

  “You’re thinking you could draw him out?”

  He could see the wheels working behind her lovely eyes. “Maybe. Or maybe he’ll think we’re closing down the dig and just go for what he really wants. Then we know.”

  She nodded slowly, closing her eyes as she thought. Golden sunlight bathed her face, and he found himself thinking that she should always be out in the sunlight. Its warm touch magnified her beauty.

  “I’m worried about them,” she said. “The team. I’ve been worried since Larry was hurt. No one thinks it was intentional, and given the crazy things that have happened since, I have to agree. But what if this person does something worse? What if we don’t just get scared off? Maybe it would be better to have everyone stay away, at least for a little while.”

  It had to be her decision, so he said nothing, merely continued to hold her hand while the day aged.

  * * *

  Stockman watched from a distance through his high-powered scope. From time to time he caught sight of the twin brothers slipping around the ravine like they thought they might actually creep up on something.

  Then there was the damn lady scientist and her college professor lover. The others had skedaddled at the sound of the chanting last night, but not those two.

  He’d told Broadus they weren’t scaring off, but Broadus didn’t seem worried. “I just need a little more time to wrap up my business.”

  Stockman was growing increasingly annoyed. He was beginning to wonder why Broadus had hired him at all. Sure, he’d been given a general outline, but nothing Broadus had him doing right now seemed to fit that outline.

  Here he was, twiddling his thumbs, doing dumb things to try to scare some folks away from some damned fossils. In fact, he felt stupid about the whole thing. A rockslide intended to do no harm? Spooky sounds in the night?

  This wasn’t his style at all. He liked to move swiftly, clean up whatever the problem was, then move on. He didn’t necessarily have to kill anyone—in fact, he vastly preferred not to—but Broadus had hired him and now had him hamstrung in these damn woods just as the freaking mosquitoes seemed to be coming to life.

  There was no rhyme or reason to it. If Broadus wanted the fossils for himself, all he had to do was say so. There were lots of ways to take care of that. If he wanted the dig shut down and the fossils gone for some reason, that was easy to take care of as well.

  This damn show was somewhere in the middle and wasn’t making a lick of sense. Maybe Broadus was stupider than he seemed. Maybe he didn’t know what he was doing. Although when Stockman thought about it, he figured that given how much money Broadus seemed to have, he couldn’t be a total idiot.

  Still... Stockman sighed heavily. He was running out of patience. If something didn’t happen soon, he might just take out that whole damn wall of fossils himself. He had pretty high confidence in his AR15 to do enough damage to make the whole site worthless. And if he took a few scientists out at the same time, so what? Damn woman was running around like a mother duck with her ducklings in tow. Except she didn’t seem to feel very protective of them.

  Broadus had better make up his mind what he wanted, soon, or Stockman might just take matters into his own hands.

  In fact, the more he thought about it, the better he liked the idea. A little mayhem might make those sacred lands profane forever. He liked that idea as well.

  * * *

  A dust cloud rose in the sky toward the south, suggesting that the others were returning. Renee saw it and leaned forward. “Here they come.” Yes, indeed, and she still hadn’t decided how to handle Cope’s suggestion. The rockslide had given her cause to offer them a chance to leave with a good grade, but these last things, the strange screaming, the chanting... They didn’t really seem threatening, did they? Except the chanting had caused her stalwart crew to spend the night in town. That combined with the death scream had been enough.

  She wondered if they’d even want to work during daylight. Then she remembered all she had discussed with Cope, primarily the sense that this was ratcheting up somehow. Whoever wanted them gone seemed to be getting a bit impatient.

  Nothing deadly, but getting worse, to judge by last night. That could be a recipe for disaster.

  The car pulled up, disgorging Maddie, Mason and Bets. They were carrying white bakery bags and a drink tray of tall plastic cups.

  “Pastries for everyone, and lattes from Maude’s diner if you want them.”

  Cope and Renee exchanged looks. “Lattes?” he said.

  “Without coffee grounds?”

  A gale of laughter greeted that remark. Soon they were gathered around the fire, everyone eating doughnuts or Danish in one hand and holding tall lattes in the other.

  “Denise and Carlos stayed with Larry,” Mason explained. “Frankly, I think after the weird noises Larry’s afraid to come out here.”

  “Maybe he should be,” Renee said bluntly.

  That silenced everyone. Then Maddie said, “Aw, c’mon. Just because the chanting and that screaming made us want to sleep in town?”

  “Not because of that,” Renee answered. “Mostly because whatever is going on here seems to be increasing. I don’t want to see anyone else get hurt.”

  “But why...” Mason’s voice trailed off.

  “Someone wants us gone from here,” Maddie said quietly. “That’s what you think?”

  Before Renee could answer, Mason spoke angrily. “I’m not going to let anybody drive me off with some spooky noi
ses. For heaven’s sake, Renee, this is too important.”

  “It’s apparently important enough to someone else that they didn’t care if they hurt someone. I hate to say it, but I want you guys to stay away from the dig.”

  “For how long?” Maddie asked, almost sounding like she wanted to cry. “I’ve been looking forward to this for months.”

  “Hopefully not long,” Renee answered. “But we’ve got to figure out what’s going on here before we move ahead. I don’t want to be worrying myself sick about you guys. So you’re getting a brief holiday. At least I hope it’s brief.”

  Well, that threw a wet blanket over the morning’s mood, Renee thought. Anger and weariness warred in her. Anger that someone wanted them out of here, and weariness from worrying about what she couldn’t see or touch. Even when she tried to ignore it, the worry was at the back of her mind, mostly for her team. With the exception of Claudia, they were young, and even at her not-so-advanced age of thirty-four, they seemed terribly young to her.

  As the thought of Claudia crossed her mind, she asked, “Has anyone seen Claudia?”

  Bets, Maddie and Mason exchanged looks. “No,” Bets said. “Last time I saw her, she said she had some research to do. You haven’t heard anything?”

  “Not a peep.” Renee shook her head. “I wonder what she’s trying to find out. I know we need her to come up with the composition of the rock around the fossils. There are so many of them, and they all seem extremely well preserved.”

  “That’s probably it then,” said Maddie. “You’ve known Claudia for a while, Renee. She can get her head lost in rocks like the rest of us do in clouds.”

  It was a valiant attempt at humor, but Renee noticed that the three of them were beginning to look toward the path up the mountain, as if waging internal battles about what they should do.

  Cope hadn’t spoken a word since the discussion about whether to remain had begun. He’d polished off a doughnut and pretty much finished his coffee, listening intently, but silent. She wished he’d let any of them know what he was thinking. He’d been the first to suggest she keep the team off the mountain. Was he changing his mind?