Tyrannosaur Canyon

by Douglas Preston

"Of course."

  "I have a little, ah, challenge for you. Are you game?"

  "Well, sure," Corvus had a reputation for aloofness, even arrogance, but now he seemed almost playful.

  "Something just between us."

  Melodie paused, then said carefully, "What do you mean?"

  He handed her the sample and she looked at it. There was a label slid into the bag, handwritten, which said: New Mexico, specimen #1.

  "I'd like you to analyze the sample in here without any preconceived notions about where it came from or what it might be. A complete mineralogical, crystallographical, chemical, and structural analysis."

  "No problem."

  "Here's the rub. I'd like to keep this secret. Don't write anything down or store anything on a hard drive. When you run tests on it, download the data onto CDs and hard-delete the data from the system. Keep the CDs locked up in your specimen cabinet at all times. Don't tell anyone what you're doing or discuss your findings with anyone. Report to me directly." He gave her another brilliant smile. "Are you game?"

  Crookshank felt a tingle of excitement at the intrigue of it and the fact that Corvus had chosen to take her into his confidence. "I don't know. Why so hush-hush?"

  Corvus leaned forward. She caught the faint scent of cigars and tweed. "That, my dear Melodie, you shall know – after you've done your analysis. As I said, I don't want to give you any preconceived notions."

  The idea intrigued her – thrilled her, even. Corvus was one of those men who radiated power, who looked like he could have anything he wanted just by taking it. At the same time, he was a little feared and disliked in the museum by many of the other curators, and all this false friendliness only confirmed in her own mind that he was a bit of a rogue – albeit a handsome, charming one.

  He placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. "What do you say, Melodie? Shall we conspire together?"

  "All right." Why the hell not? She knew what she was getting into, at least. "Any particular time frame on this?"

  "As soon as possible. But don't cut any corners. Do it right."

  She nodded.

  "Good. I can't tell you how important that is." He raised his eyebrows and cocked his head, grinned again as he noticed her eyeing the specimen. "Go ahead. Take a closer look."

  She turned her attention to the specimen more closely, her interest aroused. It was a three-, four-hundred-gram chunk of brown rock. Right away she could see what it was, at least in general terms. There was some really unusual structure in there. She felt her pulse quicken, her heart speed up. New Mexico, specimen #1. This was going to be fun.

  She lowered the baggie and her eyes met his. He was looking at her intently, his pale gray eyes almost colorless in the fluorescent glow of the lab.

  "This is amazing," she said. "If I'm not mistaken this is–"

  "Ah!" He placed a finger gently against her lips, and winked. "Our little secret." He removed his hand, rose as if to go, then turned back as if on an afterthought. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a long velvet box. He held it out to her. "A little thank you."

  Crookshank took it, TIFFANY was written on the front.

  Yeah right, she thought, taking the box. She snapped it open and was dazzled by the sight of gemstones, blue stars. She blinked, hardly able to see. Star sapphires. A bracelet of star sapphires set in platinum. She peered closely and recognized immediately they were real, not synthetics. Each one was different, each one slightly flawed, each one with its very own nuance of color and hue and personality. She turned the box in the light, seeing the stars on each stone move, the light reflecting off their rutilated depths. She swallowed, feeling a sudden lump in her throat. No one had given her anything like this, ever. Ever. She felt a hot tickling in her eyes, which she instantly blinked away, horrified to discover herself so vulnerable.

  She said in an offhand way, "Nice collection of aluminum oxide you got here."

  "I was hoping you would like star sapphires, Melodie."

  Crookshank swallowed again, keeping her face turned to the bracelet so he couldn't see her eyes. She didn't think she had ever loved anything so much as this bracelet. Sri Lankan star sapphires, her favorite, each one unique, forged in the depths of the earth by immense heat and pressure – mineralogy incarnate. She knew she was being shamelessly and openly manipulated, but at the same time she thought: Why not? Why shouldn't she take it? Wasn't that the way the world worked?

  She felt Corvus's hand come to rest on her shoulder, giving it the gentlest of squeezes. It was like an electric shock. To her mortification a tear escaped and ran hotly down her cheek. She blinked rapidly, unable to speak, grateful that he was standing behind her and couldn't see. Another hand took the other shoulder, squeezing just a little in unison, and she could feel the heat of his presence on the nape of her neck. An erotic charge ran through her like a bolt of lightning, and she flushed and tingled all over.

  "Melodie, I'm awfully grateful for your help. I know how good you are at what you do. That's why I entrusted this sample to you – and to no one else. That's why I gave you the bracelet. It's not just a bribe – although it is a bit of that." He chuckled, patting her shoulder. "It's an expression of my faith in you, Melodie Crookshank."

  She nodded, her head still turned away.

  The hands squeezed, rubbed, caressed her shoulders. "Thank you, Melodie."

  "Okay," she whispered.

  Chapter 8

  WHEN TOM'S FATHER had died, and he had inherited an ocean of money, his sole indulgence had been buying his truck. It was a 1957 Chevy 3100 pickup with a turquoise body and a white top, chrome grill, three-speed on the floor. It once belonged to a classic car collector in Albuquerque, a real fanatic who had lovingly rebuilt the engine and drive train, machined the parts he couldn't find, and rechromed everything down to the knobs on the radio. As an ultimate touch, he'd upholstered the interior in the finest, creamiest white kid leather. The poor man had died of a heart attack before he could enjoy the fruits of his labor, and Tom had picked it up from an ad in the Thrifty Nickel. He had paid the widow every penny it was worth – fifty-five grand – and still he felt he'd gotten a bargain. It was a work of driveable sculpture.

  It was already noon. Tom had driven everywhere, asked around at the Sunset, and had wandered as many of the forest roads that he knew near the high mesas, to no avail. All he learned was that he was merely retracing the footsteps of the Santa Fe Police, who were also trying to find out if anyone had encountered the murdered man before his death.

  It seemed the man had been very careful to hide his tracks.

  Tom had decided to visit Ben Peek, who lived in the funky hamlet of Cerrillos, New Mexico. A former gold-mining town that had seen better days, Cerrillos lay in a cottonwood-filled hollow off the main road, a cluster of old adobe and wooden buildings scattered along the dry bed of Galisteo Creek. The mines had played out decades ago but Cerrillos had avoided ghost-town status by being revived by hippies in the sixties, who bought up abandoned miners' cabins and installed in them pottery studios, leather shops, and macramé factories. It was now inhabited by a curious mixture of old Spanish families who once worked the mines, aging freaks, and curious eccentrics.

  Ben Peek was one of the latter, and his place looked it. The old battenboard house hadn't been painted in a generation. The dirt yard, enclosed by a leaning picket fence, was crowded with rusted mining equipment. In one corner stood a heap of purple and green glass insulators from telephone poles. A sign nailed to the side of the house said,

  THE WHAZZIT SHOP

  EVERYTHING FOR SALE

  including proprietor

  no reasonable offers refused

  Tom stepped out. Ben Peek had been a professional prospector for forty years until a jack mule broke his hip. He had grudgingly settled down in Cerrillos with a collection of junk and a stock of dubious stories. Despite his eccentric appearance, he had an M.S. in geology from the Colorado School of Mines. He knew his stuff.

  Tom moun
ted the crooked portal and rapped on the door. A moment later the lights went on in the dimness beyond, a face appeared, distorted by the old rippled glass, and then the door opened to the tinkle of a bell.

  "Tom Broadbent!" Peek's rough hand grasped Tom's and gave it a bone-crushing squeeze. Peek was no more than five feet five, but he made up for it with vigor and a booming voice. He had a five-day growth of beard, crow's-feet around a pair of lively black eyes, and a brow that wrinkled up so much that it gave him a perpetual look of surprise.

  "How are you, Ben?"

  "Terrible, just terrible. Come on in."

  He led Tom through his shop, the walls covered with shelves groaning under heaps of old rocks, iron tools, and glass bottles. Everything was for sale, but nothing, it seemed, ever sold. The price tags were yellowing antiques themselves. They passed into a back room, which functioned as a kitchen and dining room. Peek's dogs were sleeping on the floor, sighing loudly in their dreams. The old man snagged a battered coffeepot off the stove, poured out two mugs, and gimped over to a wooden table, seating himself on one side and inviting Tom to sit on the other.

  "Sugar? Milk?"

  "Black."

  Tom watched as the old man heaped three tablespoons of sugar into his, followed by three tablespoons of Cremora, stirring the mixture into a kind of sludge. Tom sipped his coffee cautiously. It was surprisingly good – hot, strong, brewed cowboy style the way he liked it.

  "How's Sally?"

  "Fantastic, as always."

  Peek nodded. "Wonderful woman you got there, Tom."

  "Don't I know it."

  Peek rapped a. pipe out on the edge of the fireplace and began filling it with Borkum Riff. "Yesterday morning I read in the New Mexican that you found a murdered man up in the high mesas."

  "There's more to the story than what was in the paper. Can I count on you to keep this to yourself?"

  "Of course."

  Tom told Peek the story – omitting the part about the notebook.

  "Any idea who the prospector was?" he asked Peek at the end.

  Peek snorted. "Treasure hunters are a pack of credulous half-wits. In the whole history of the West nobody ever found a real honest-to-God buried treasure."

  "This man did."

  "I'll believe it when I see it. And no, I haven't heard anything about a treasure hunter up there, but that doesn't mean much – they're a secretive lot."

  "Any idea what the treasure might be? Assuming it exists."

  Peek grunted. "I was a prospector, not a treasure hunter. There's a big difference."

  "But you spent time up there."

  "Twenty-five years."

  "You heard stories."

  Peek lit a wooden kitchen match and held it to his pipe. "Sure did."

  "Humor me."

  "When this was still Spanish territory, they say there was a gold mine up there north of Abiquiú called El Capitán. You know that story?"

  "Never heard it."

  "They say they took out almost ten thousand ounces, cast it into ingots stamped with the Lion and Castle. The Apaches were tearing up the country, so instead of packing it out they walled it up in a cave waiting for things to settle down. It so happened that one day the Apaches raided the mine. They killed everyone except a fellow named Juan Cabrillo, who'd gone to Abiquiú for supplies. Cabrillo came back and found his companions dead. He took off for Santa Fe and returned with an armed group to collect the gold. But a couple of weeks had passed and there'd been heavy rains and a flash flood. The landmarks had changed. They found the mine all right, the camp, and the skeletons of their murdered friends. But they never could find that cave. Juan spent years looking for it – until he disappeared in those mesas, never to be seen again. Or so the story goes."

  "Interesting."

  "There's more. Back in the 1930s, a fellow named Ernie Kilpatrick was looking for a maverick bull in one of those canyons back up there. He was camped near English Rocks, just south of the Echo Badlands. As the sun was setting he claimed he saw where a fresh landslide on a nearby rock face – just up Tyrannosaur Canyon – had unseated what looked like a cave. He climbed up and crawled inside. It was a short, narrow tunnel with pick marks in the walls. He followed it until it opened up into a chamber. He just about died when his candle lit up a whole wall of crude gold bars stamped with the Lion and Castle. He pocketed one and rode back to Abiquiú. That night he got drunk in the saloon and like a damned fool started showing the gold bar around. Someone followed him out, shot and robbed him. Of course, the secret died with him and the gold bar was never seen again."

  He spit a piece of tobacco off his tongue, "All these treasure stories are the same."

  "You don't believe it."

  "Not a damned word." Peek leaned back and rewarded himself by lighting his pipe afresh and taking a few puffs, waiting for comment.

  "I have to tell you, Ben, I talked to the man. He found something big."

  Peek shrugged.

  "Is there anything else he might have found of value up there besides the El Capitán hoard?"

  "Sure. There's all kinds of possibilities up there in terms of minerals and precious metals. If he was a prospector. Or maybe he was a pot-hunter, digging up Indian ruins. Did you get a look at his equipment?"

  "It was all packed on the burro. I didn't see anything unusual."

  Peek grunted again. "If he was a prospector, he might have found uranium or moly. Uranium is sometimes found in the upper member of the Chinle Formation, which crops out in Tyrannosaur Canyon, Huckbay Canyon, and all around lower Joaquin. I looked for uranium back in the late fifties, didn't find squat. But then again I didn't have the right equipment, scintillation counters and such."

  "You mentioned Tyrannosaur Canyon twice."

  "Big damn canyon with a million tributaries, cuts all the way across the Echo Bandlands and up into the high mesas. Used to be good for uranium and moly."

  "Is uranium worth anything these days?"

  "Not unless you have a private buyer on the black market. The feds sure aren't buying – they've got too much as it is."

  "Could it be of use to terrorists?"

  Peek shook his head. "Doubt it. You'd need a billion-dollar enrichment program."

  "How about making a dirty bomb?"

  "Yellow cake, even pure uranium, has almost no radioactivity. The idea that uranium is dangerously radioactive is a popular misconception."

  "You mentioned moly. What's that?"

  "Molybdenum. Up there on the backside of Tyrannosaur Canyon there's some outcroppings of Oligocene trachyandesite porphyry which has been associated with moly. I found some moly up there, but they'd already high-graded the deposit and what I found didn't amount to day-old piss in a chamber pot. There could be more – there's always more, somewhere."

  "Why do they call it Tyrannosaur Canyon?"

  "There's a big basaltic intrusion right at the mouth, weathered in such a way that the top of it looks like a T. Rex skull. The Apaches wouldn't go up it, claim it's haunted. It's where my mule spooked and threw me. Broke my hip. Three days before they medevacked me out. So yeah – if it isn't haunted, it should be. I never went back."

  "What about gold? I heard you found some back there."

  Ben chuckled. "Sure I did. Gold is a curse to all who find it. Back in '86 I found a quartz boulder all spun through with wire gold in the bottom of Maze Wash. Sold it to a mineral dealer for nine thousand dollars – and then I spent ten times that amount looking for where it came from. The damn rock had to have come from somewhere but I never did find the mother lode. I figure it somehow rolled all the way out of the Canjilon Mountains, where there's a bunch of played-out gold mines and old mining towns. Like I said, gold is a loser. I never touched the stuff after that." He laughed, drew another cloud of smoke from his pipe.

  "Anything else you can think of?"

  "This 'treasure' of his might have been an Indian ruin. There are a lot of Anasazi ruins back up in there. Before I knew better I used to dig ar
ound some of those old sites, sold the arrowheads and pots I found. Nowadays a nice Chaco black-on-white bowl might fetch five, ten thousand. That's worth troubling about. And then there's the Lost City of the Padres."

  "What's that?"

  "Tom, my boy, I've told you that story."

  "No you haven't."

  Peek sucked on his pipe, with a gurgle. "Back around the turn of the century, a French padre named Eusebio Bernard got lost up there somewhere on Mesa de los Viejos on his way from Santa Fe to Chama. While wandering around trying to find his way out, he spied a huge Anasazi cliff dwelling, big as Mesa Verde, hidden in an alcove in the rock below him. It had four towers, hundreds of room blocks, a real lost city. No one ever found it again."

  "A true story?"

  Peek smiled. "Probably not."

  "What about oil or gas? Could he have been looking for that?"

  "Doubt it. It's true that the Chama wilderness lies right on the edge of the San Juan Basin, one of the richest natural gas fields in the Southwest. Trouble is, you need a whole team of roughnecks with seismic probes for that game. A lone prospector doesn't stand a chance." Peek stirred the ashes of his pipe with a tool, tamped it down, relit it. "If he was looking for ghosts, well, they say they're quite a few up there. The Apaches claim they've heard the T. Rex roar."

  "We're getting off the subject, Ben."

  "You said you wanted stories."

  Tom held up a hand. "I draw the line at ghost dinosaurs."

  "I suppose it's possible this unknown prospector of yours found the El Capitán hoard. Ten thousand ounces of gold would be worth..." Peek screwed up his face, "almost four million dollars. But you have to consider the numismatic value of those old Spanish bars stamped with the Lion and Castle. Hell, you'd get at least twenty, thirty times the bullion value. Now we're talking money... Anyway, you come back and tell me more about this murder. And I'll tell you about the ghost of La Llorona, the Wailing Woman."

  "Deal".

  Chapter 9

  IN THE FIRST-CLASS cabin of Continental flight 450 from LaGuardia to Albuquerque, Weed Maddox stretched out. Easing his leather chair back, he cracked his laptop and sipped a Pellegrino while waiting for it to boot up. Funny, he thought, how he was just like the other men around him, wearing expensive suits and tapping away at their laptops. It would be rich, really rich, if the executive vice president or managing partner next to him could see what it was he was working on.