by Stuart Gibbs
“That’s all?” Summer interrupted.
“Believe it or not, that’s not too bad,” Dr. Chen said. “And not that uncommon. No one has ever found a complete skeleton of any dinosaur. There have been millions of years for the pieces to get lost or destroyed. The most complete T. rex ever found was eighty-five percent, and some have been as little as ten. But the really important thing was that we found the skull. A mostly intact one, no less. Because a skull is by far the most important piece of a dinosaur fossil.”
Now I couldn’t help but speak up. “Why’s that?”
“Because a skull tells you almost everything important you want to know about a dinosaur,” Dr. Chen replied. “For starters, what species it was, but also what it ate, its approximate age, the size of its brain, whether it was sick or not, how important its various senses were, and hundreds of other things. You can’t tell any of that from, say, a rib.” She pointed dismissively at some nearby bones on the ground.
Up until that point, I hadn’t even recognized that they were bones at all, even though a good deal of dirt had been excavated around them. They weren’t intact ribs, but were broken into pieces; I had thought they were merely rocks that were being cleared out of the way. It made me wonder how anyone had ever realized they were fossils.
Dad must have been thinking the same thing, because he asked, “How did anyone even find this dinosaur in the first place?”
Mr. Bonotto looked proudly at Sage. “That’s the work of this little man.”
Sage grinned. “I’d been fishing in the river and was on my way back, climbing up the bluff, when I noticed what looked like a tooth, right over there.” He pointed to a spot at the base of the bluff. A gouge two feet across and equally as tall had been removed from the dirt—the former location of the skull, I figured.
“So I started digging around it,” Sage went on. “And then I realized it was connected to a bone, and then, well… I couldn’t believe it.”
“That must have been crazy,” Summer said.
“Insane,” Sage agreed. “So I rode home to tell my parents, and they didn’t believe me…”
“Well, who would have?” Mrs. Bonotto interjected. “We’d been out here a million times and never noticed anything.”
“So I brought them back out here, and I showed them,” Sage continued. “And we called the university right away…”
“And that’s where I come in,” Dr. Chen finished. “I came out the moment I heard. And to be honest, I couldn’t believe it either. Only fifteen tyrannosaur skulls have ever been found, and those were mostly in Montana. So to find one here… It’s a landmark discovery. Or, it would have been…” She trailed off, suddenly overcome by emotion, blinking tears away. “I’m sorry,” she sniffed. “I can’t even begin to explain how big a loss this is.”
“For the university museum?” Xavier asked.
“No,” Dr. Chen said. “For science. There’s still a great deal we don’t know about the T. rex. So a new skull has the potential to teach us an enormous amount about the species. It’s also possible that this might have been a new subspecies. Or a new species of dinosaur altogether. But with the skull gone, we’ll never know.”
She hung her head in dismay, and the other members of the dig did as well. The overwhelming feeling of sadness descended over the site once again.
The whole time we had been talking, Sheriff Esquivel hadn’t even tried to hide his annoyance that we had interrupted him. Now he took the chance to resume his previous line of thought. “On that note, as I was saying before, I have some serious questions about how an object of that size could possibly have been stolen at all.”
“You think we just misplaced it?” Sage’s father asked sarcastically. “It was the size of an ATV and weighed at least a quarter of a ton!”
“That’s what concerns me too,” the sheriff said. “You’d need a truck to get that thing out of here, and the closest road is five miles away.”
“Three and a half,” Dr. Chen corrected. “Trust me, I’ve walked it enough times.”
“You guys park all the way out there?” Summer asked her, surprised.
“Yes,” Dr. Chen answered. “Though we don’t walk it every day. Most nights, we camp out.”
“Here?” I asked, looking around. I didn’t see any signs of a camp.
“About a quarter mile that way.” Dr. Chen pointed downriver. “We don’t want to compromise the dig. But last night, because of the rain, we all evacuated to a motel. So it took longer than usual to get out here this morning, because we had to drive back and walk in. Otherwise, we would have discovered the theft a lot earlier.”
“Alleged theft,” Sheriff Esquivel insisted. Ignoring everyone’s angry stares, he continued. “How, exactly, is someone supposed to carry a five-hundred-pound dinosaur skull three and a half miles without a truck?”
“The same way we would have,” Dr. Chen said angrily. “We’d sling it in a tarp and carry it out.”
Esquivel took a wad of chewing tobacco from a tin and tucked it into his lower lip. “How many people does it normally take to do something like that?”
“Eight to ten,” Dr. Chen replied.
“And how long?”
“Hours.”
“Could you be more specific?”
“A lot of hours. It probably takes about three hours to go a mile.”
Esquivel shifted the chewing tobacco in his lip. “So you’re telling me that eight to ten people traipsed all the way out here to the exact site of a secret dinosaur fossil site, grabbed a five-hundred-pound tyrannosaur skull, and then spent nine or ten hours lugging it back to the road… in the middle of a rainstorm? How on earth is that even possible?”
Mrs. Bonotto glared at the sheriff. “You’re the policeman. Isn’t it your job to figure that out?”
Esquivel said, “I cased this site carefully before the peanut gallery got here. And I’ll tell you what I did notice: There’s an awful lot of mud around here. But there’s not a single footprint leading away from this site. Only footprints coming here. If eight to ten people carried a giant skull out, you’d think there’d be at least one print leaving the scene of the crime, wouldn’t you? Statistically, there should be dozens, if not hundreds. And drag marks as well.”
Despite our annoyance at the sheriff, everyone seemed to realize that was a valid argument.
Sage mustered the best response anyone could come up with. “Maybe the rain washed all the footprints away.”
Esquivel spat a stream of tobacco juice at Sage’s feet, then walked over to the gouge in the bluff where the skull had been. It was only twelve feet from the river’s edge and the mud was deep there. His boots sank two inches down into it. Then he lifted one foot out. It made a thick sucking noise and left a large, foot-shaped divot. “That’s not just a footprint,” Esquivel said. “That’s a crater. And a person lugging something that weighed five hundred pounds would sink down even farther. I know last night’s storm was big, but it wasn’t a hurricane. If eight to ten people were here, there’d be some evidence of it.”
I started to say something, but Esquivel cut me off. “Don’t you even try to suggest that they somehow wiped away every footprint between here and the road. Because it would take hours to do that, if not days.”
That was exactly what I had been about to suggest. So I kept silent.
“A helicopter!” Xavier announced triumphantly. “Someone could have stolen the skull with a helicopter!”
“Not a chance.” Esquivel spat another stream of tobacco juice. “I served twelve years in the Marines. I know helicopters. Your average chopper can’t lift a quarter ton. You’d need a big, military-grade one to do that, and those things are loud as all get-out.” He looked to the Bonottos. “Did you hear a chopper last night?”
“No,” Sage’s father admitted. “But maybe the storm covered the noise…”
“The storm’s another problem,” Esquivel said. “Flying a helicopter in rain and lightning like we had last night
would have been borderline insanity. There are people who could do it, but they’re few and far between. Most of them are military. And even if one of those rare people did want to steal a tyrannosaur skull, they’d still have to get their hands on a helicopter that could lift it, which isn’t easy. Plus, they’d have to know about this dinosaur, which you said was top secret.”
“Why was it top secret?” Summer asked.
“To prevent thefts like this,” Dr. Chen answered. “A rare fossil like a tyrannosaur skull is worth millions of dollars. So whenever a discovery is made, its location—and ideally the discovery itself—is kept quiet. If word gets out about a dig like this, you’ll get looters.” She turned her attention to Sheriff Esquivel. “Which is probably what happened.”
“So you claim,” said Esquivel.
“How many people knew about this dinosaur?” I asked.
“You’re looking at them,” Dr. Chen replied.
I took in the small group of paleontologists and the Bonotto family.
Then I considered the location that the skull had disappeared from. There was no way anyone could have gotten close to it without going through the mud, and yet, as Sheriff Esquivel had pointed out, there were no tracks indicating that had happened. In addition, the shortest distance to the road involved crossing the swollen river, which seemed like it would be virtually impossible on a sunny day, let alone in the midst of a nighttime rainstorm.
Unlike Sheriff Esquivel, I didn’t think that Sage, his parents, Dr. Chen, and the other eight members of the dig were all lying about the skull having been stolen. But at the same time, I couldn’t imagine how anyone could have possibly made off with the skull.
Despite my fears of getting involved in trying to solve another crime, I found myself wanting to investigate, to ask more questions, to learn who the other people at the dig were, to walk around the scene and hunt for clues, to figure out what had happened.
But before I could even begin to grapple with all that, I got the strangest phone call of my life.
4 THE ANACONDA
Normally, I wouldn’t have even answered the phone at a crime scene. There was too much else to focus on and I didn’t want to be rude. But whoever was trying to reach me kept calling.
The first call came while I was standing there on the riverbank, taking in the dig site. I took my phone out, saw a number I didn’t recognize, then flipped the phone to silent mode and put it right back in my pocket.
Sheriff Esquivel was saying, “Seeing as we are still on the hunt for footprints—or any other evidence that this crime even happened—all of you need to stay the heck out of my way. So why don’t y’all move over there?” He pointed to some boulders along the riverbank, twenty yards from the dig.
“There?” Summer asked skeptically. “We won’t be able to investigate anything from over there!”
“That’s the point,” Esquivel told her. “In case you’ve forgotten, I’m the sheriff around here. This is my job, not yours.” He made a shooing gesture with his hands, the way someone would signal their dogs to get out of the house.
Summer looked ready to argue, but Dad shook his head, signaling her that this wasn’t the time.
As we all headed to the rocks with the Bonottos, my phone started buzzing in my pocket again. I ignored it.
The mud along the riverbank sucked at our feet as we moved to the boulders. We were making fresh tracks in it; whoever had stolen the skull definitely hadn’t come that way.
“The nerve of that man,” Mrs. Bonotto muttered under her breath, glaring at the sheriff over her shoulder. “He’s acting like we’re the criminals. Why on earth would we lie to him about a skull being stolen?”
The boulders were still wet and slick from the rain. Some were as big as cars. Most were jumbled on the riverbank, though there were also a few in the swollen river, which surged around them, forming tiny rapids.
Sage scrambled up onto the boulders on the riverbank like they were a jungle gym. Xavier and Summer followed him. Summer moved with the agility and grace of a mountain goat. Xavier had more trouble. He had the climbing skills of a rhinoceros.
I would have followed, but my phone stopped ringing and then started vibrating in a different pattern. Text messages.
I removed it from my pocket again, this time to read what had been sent.
Call me back.
Its an emurgency.
Its searious.
Then my phone started ringing again.
“Who’s calling you like that?” Dad asked. He had taken off his backpack and was assembling his camera to take photos of the dig.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“They seem awfully desperate to reach you,” Dad said. “Think they might be in trouble?”
“Maybe,” I admitted, and then answered the phone.
“Finally!” the caller said, sounding annoyed. I immediately recognized the voice—and the nasty attitude. It was one of the Barksdale twins calling me, though I wasn’t sure which. Tim and Jim were equally mean and dumb. They were in the class ahead of me at school and they had caused plenty of trouble for me, as well as almost every other student.
“Tim?” I asked, taking a chance.
“No, it’s Jim, idiot.”
“Sorry, Jim, I’m in the middle of something right now…”
“Well, so am I. I’ve got a big problem here. Do you know how to get a cat out of a snake?”
I had been about to hang up until that sentence. I didn’t really feel like helping anyone who had just called me an idiot—or repeatedly bullied me at school. But my interest was piqued. I had to ask, “What are you talking about?”
“Tim and I just got this new pet snake, and it sort of ate our cat.”
“It sort of ate your cat?”
At this, my father looked at me curiously, but I signaled that I needed a bit more time on the phone before I could explain it all.
“Yeah,” Jim said. I now noticed that he didn’t sound quite as tough as he usually tried to. There was a hitch in his voice, like he might be trying not to cry. “Snakes swallow their food whole, right? So that means the cat could still be alive inside?”
This was wrong. Snakes did swallow their food whole, but they always killed it first. However, I didn’t feel like breaking that news to Jim quite yet. I still had a lot of questions to ask. “How big a cat are we talking about here?”
“Pretty big for a cat. It’s Griselda.”
I knew Griselda. The Barksdales let her roam free around town. She was famous for being the biggest cat anyone had ever seen—and possibly the meanest. She often terrorized children at the playground, where she habitually left dead birds under the jungle gym and extremely large poops in the sand pit.
“Jim!” I exclaimed. “Griselda must be twenty pounds!”
“Twenty-five.”
“What kind of snake did you get?”
“An anaconda.”
“An anaconda?” I repeated, drawing a new round of stares from everyone. “How big is it?”
“Fifteen feet, I think. Maybe sixteen. So how do we get Griz back out of it? Can we do the hind lick maneuver or something?”
“You mean the Heimlich maneuver?”
“Yeah, whatever. I know that with humans, you’re supposed to hit them in the stomach to make them throw up their food, but we don’t know where the stomach is in this thing. It’s like all neck.”
“Not exactly,” I said, amazed that one person could be wrong about so many things. That wasn’t how the Heimlich maneuver was performed, and snakes were not all neck. “How long ago did this happen?”
“I don’t know. Maybe an hour or so. We left Julius—”
“Julius?” I interrupted.
“The snake. That’s his name. Julius Squeezer. We left him home with Griz so the two of them could play while we were gone. And then we came home and, well… we called to Griz and she didn’t come. And then we found Julius with this lump the size of a cat in his throat. That’s Griselda, ri
ght?”
“Probably so,” I said.
To my surprise, Jim burst into tears.
Dad was still standing beside me, now taking photos of the dig site, but also trying to piece together what I was talking about by eavesdropping on my half of the conversation. Sage and Xavier were climbing around on the giant rocks along the riverbank while Summer hopped from one boulder to another in the river.
Over by the dig, Sheriff Esquivel was grilling Dr. Chen while the other eight people on her team sat sullenly nearby, waiting their turn.
The young policewoman, Brewster, was staring at me. But the moment I looked her way, she turned, pretending like she hadn’t been looking at me at all.
On the phone, Jim was doing his best to control his sobbing. “What if we cut the snake open?” he asked. “Would Griselda still be alive in there? Like in ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ where she cuts the big bad wolf open and her grandma is perfectly fine?”
“Um… that’s a fairy tale,” I said cautiously.
“What do you think would be the best to cut the snake open with? A machete or a chain saw? We have both.”
“Don’t cut the snake open!” I warned, more urgently than I had intended. I didn’t want them to kill it—and I wondered if it might kill the Barksdales in self-defense.
“But Griselda’s in there,” Jim wailed.
“Griselda’s gone,” I told him. “Julius would have killed her before eating her.”
“No!” Jim started blubbering into the phone again.
I almost felt sorry for him. But then I remembered he was a complete jerk who had consigned his evil cat to death by doing something incredibly moronic.
Dad was still eavesdropping. At the same time, he was using his telephoto lens to take photos of the crime scene from a distance.
“Jim,” I said, “where did you get an anaconda that big?”
Jim stopped crying and shifted back into his usual, nasty persona. “Why do you care?”
In truth, I suspected he had obtained the snake illegally. There was a massive illegal pet trade in America that made billions of dollars a year. While there were plenty of legitimate reptile dealers, I doubted any of them were selling fifteen-foot-long anacondas. However, I didn’t tell Jim that. Instead, I said, “It’s important. So that more cats like Griselda don’t die.”
