by Stuart Gibbs
“Can you go on all the rides whenever you want?” Caitlyn asked. “And not even have to wait in line?”
“Not really,” Summer said, although the truth was, if she had ever wanted to cut the lines, she could have.
While the girls were distracted hounding Summer with questions, I turned to Julie. “How did you end up on this dig?” I asked.
“We applied for it,” Julie replied. She seemed excited to talk, like she was bored after sitting by the pool all day. “Although we didn’t apply for this dig in particular. Because until a few weeks ago, this dig didn’t even exist. We thought we’d be going to Montana. That’s where most of the dinosaur fossils are.”
“What did you have to do to apply?”
“Oh, it was easy. The University of Texas has it all set up online. We simply filled out some forms and sent in a deposit. Anita—that’s Maddy’s mother—and I thought the girls would love it. They’ve been friends since kindergarten and have always been crazy about dinosaurs. They used to pretend they were a stegosaur and an ankylosaurus who were best friends—”
“Mom!” Caitlyn snapped. “Too much information!”
“Sorry,” Julie said, though she gave me a wink to know she found her daughter’s embarrassment amusing.
“So the university just accepted you for this dig?” I asked.
“Not quite. At first, we were wait-listed. Turns out, this is a very popular program. The girls were very upset. We figured we’d be out of the running until next summer. But then, a couple weeks ago, out of the blue, we got a call from Dr. Chen. She told us that this tyrannosaur had just been discovered and that it was a huge find and that we were next on the dig list, so we had dibs if we wanted to come. Unfortunately, due to the timing, Anita couldn’t make it, but I was still available, and the girls were so excited. We had never expected we’d get to excavate a T. rex! So we decided to move things around and come for a few weeks.”
“Is that what happened with the other people on the dig too?”
“That’s the case with the Carvilles and the Brocks. Those are the older couples. They’ve all known each other since college! They said they try to volunteer for a different thing every year: building houses for the poor, protecting sea turtles after they hatch, that sort of stuff. But they were on the wait list too, until Dr. Chen called. It was easy for them to come on the spur of the moment, because they’re all retired and they don’t live too far from here. Fort Worth, I think.”
A semitruck roared past on the access road, going well above the speed limit. The pool was so close to the road that we could feel the slipstream as the truck went by.
“How about Jebediah Weems?” I asked.
“I’m not sure about him,” Julie said. “He kept to himself. Talked to himself too. To be honest, the guy was kind of creepy.”
“Kind of creepy?” Madison interjected. “The guy was a full-on skeeve.”
“I don’t think he came off the wait list,” Julie clarified. “But given that he’s Harper Weems’s cousin, maybe he could simply buy his way onto any dig he wanted to.”
I asked, “What did he talk to himself about?”
“I don’t know,” Julie replied. “To be honest, I didn’t want to be close enough to listen. The dig wasn’t that social anyway. I had expected that we’d all be talking the whole time we were out there and then sitting around the campfire at night, but the days were long and hard. And the heat! It would just drain you. We were always too tired to do much after dinner except go to bed. So I mostly spent my time with the girls. I didn’t really even get a chance to know the Carvilles and the Brocks that well until two nights ago, when we all had drinks at Ruby’s during the rain.”
“But not Jeb?” I asked.
“He wasn’t there,” Julie said.
“Oh?” I did my best not to sound too suspicious. According to everyone at Ruby’s, there had been nine people in the group at the bar that night. “I’d heard the whole dig was there.”
“Not Jeb,” Julie reported. “He said he wasn’t feeling well and stayed in his room. Not that it was any big loss. It was probably better without him there. I think he made Dr. Chen a little uncomfortable too.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe, like the girls, she thought he was a skeeve. Or maybe Dr. Chen was just more relaxed at the bar because we’d all had a few drinks. I mean, she was in top form that night, telling us all these crazy stories about her paleontology expeditions. It was fascinating. I wish the bar would have let the girls stay to listen to her, seeing as she was a little late to dinner.”
“Late?” I repeated.
“She stayed behind at the site to make sure everything was prepped for the rain. We all had our concerns, leaving her there, but Dr. Chen’s probably tougher than all of us put together. She demanded we all go on ahead so we wouldn’t get caught in the rain. And I guess it didn’t take her that long. After all, she was probably only an hour or so behind us, if that.”
I frowned, despite myself. I had been thinking it was suspicious that Dr. Chen had been late to dinner, but an hour wouldn’t have given her a chance to steal the skull, even if she’d had an entire team of helpers lurking in the bushes.
Meanwhile, Jeb Weems had been missing the entire night, which was suspicious….
“Is something wrong?” Julie asked, noticing the look on my face.
“Er… no,” I said. “What kind of stories was Dr. Chen telling?”
“There was one about her having to chase off some bone thieves in Australia with a boomerang… I can’t really do it justice. I’m sure she’d be happy to tell you if you got to see her again. I tell you, the woman is incredible. She probably knows more about theropod dinosaurs than anyone else on earth.”
As Julie talked, I noticed her hands. They had taken a beating during her time on the dig. Her fingers were covered with Band-Aids, as well as white patches of what I figured was plaster from the bone casts that she hadn’t been able to scrub off. Her fingernails were worn down to the nubs. It was all a testament to the hard work she had done.
I glanced over at Madison’s and Caitlyn’s hands. They looked the same.
Caitlyn was grilling Summer about a famous singer that she was rumored to have dated. “You swear you two weren’t a thing? Because all the websites said you two were a thing.”
“I’ve never even met the guy,” Summer said, sounding a bit exasperated. “So we couldn’t have even remotely been a thing.”
Summer never told anyone that she was my girlfriend, because then it would drag me—and her private life—into the spotlight, and she didn’t want either one of those things to happen. At times like this, I could see why that was a good idea.
But Summer’s fame was certainly working to our advantage now. I had noticed that people tended to offer up information very quickly around her, eager to create a bond with her. I doubted the girls—or Julie—would have been quite so quick to talk to me had I shown up alone.
Given that, I decided to press Julie a little harder about how many people had actually been at the bar that night. “So, Dr. Chen was just hanging out, telling all those stories to only you and the Brocks and the Carvilles?”
“Oh, she had the whole bar listening to her,” Julie replied. “The woman can really spin a story. Although I think half the men wanted to ask her out. I know the Brocks’ son did.”
“The Brocks’ son?” I asked, a little quicker than I had intended.
Julie didn’t seem to notice. “Yes. I think his name was Robert. He works in moving and storage down in San Antonio. When he heard that his parents weren’t camping for the night, he came up to meet us all for dinner. And I’m sure he was glad he did. He was looking at Dr. Chen the way these two girls look at the high-school quarterback.”
“Mom!” Caitlyn exclaimed. “Please stop talking.”
Julie made a face at me that indicated she might have pushed things too far.
I tried to think of a way to ask mor
e questions about Robert Brock without it seeming odd, but couldn’t. So instead, I asked, “So what happens with the dig now?”
“I don’t know,” Julie replied. “I’m not sure Dr. Chen knows herself, the poor thing. She was devastated by that theft. Her room is right next to ours, and the walls in this place might as well be tissue paper. You can hear right through them. She was bawling last night. I hope we’ll end up excavating the rest of Minerva. I mean, why leave a dinosaur in the ground? But if the skull is the most important part for science, then maybe excavating all the rest is just a waste of time.” Despite the sadness in her voice, Julie’s eyes lit up a second later as she noticed someone behind me. She waved and said, “Hey there!”
I turned to see the Carvilles and the Brocks crossing the parking lot from Ruby’s, headed back to their motel rooms after lunch.
One of the older men was now on crutches. He was hobbling along, keeping his right leg off the ground.
“Afternoon!” the other man called back as the women waved hello. “Getting a little pool time in, I see!”
“Might as well,” Julie called back. “Doesn’t seem like we’re digging today. Have you heard anything from Dr. Chen?”
“Not a word,” one of the older women said. “If we don’t hear from her by tonight, I think we’ll go to FunJungle tomorrow.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” Julie said.
“How’s your leg, Mr. Brock?” Caitlyn asked.
“All right,” the man with the wounded leg replied. “The doctor said it ought to be as good as new in a few days. Guess I chose the right day to wound myself, though. I wouldn’t be able to get out to the dig on these crutches.”
“Speaking of which,” his wife said, “you ought to get back to the room and elevate that leg a bit.”
Everyone said some friendly good-byes, and the Brocks and Carvilles kept on going to their rooms.
Once they were out of earshot, I asked Julie, “What happened to Mr. Brock?”
“He tripped over a curb last night,” she replied. “While leaving a restaurant.”
I pointed to Ruby’s. “This restaurant?”
“No,” Julie said. “I don’t know which one. Some place in San Marcos, I think. I guess he wrenched his ankle pretty bad. They had to take him to an urgent care facility.”
“Do you know what time that happened?” I asked.
Julie’s eyes narrowed suspiciously, like she was wondering why I would ask something like that. “Dinnertime, I guess.”
“It was night,” Madison offered helpfully. “They said he didn’t see the curb in the dark.”
“And it was late when they got back from the doctor,” Caitlyn added. “Like midnight. We watched two movies in the room last night and we were almost done with the second when we heard them come back.”
“Did you see Dr. Chen last night at all?” Summer asked.
“I know she watched a movie kind of late too,” Madison said. “We could hear it.”
“Like I said, the walls in this place are awfully thin,” Julie explained. “We might as well be camping.” She didn’t seem nearly as suspicious about Summer asking questions as she was about me. The effect of Summer’s fame again.
Summer probably could have kept questioning them for hours, but it seemed like we had bothered them enough. Plus, neither of us really had anything else to ask.
“Thanks for your time,” Summer told them. “It was nice meeting you.”
The girls seemed thrilled that Summer McCracken had said this to them. “Any chance we can get a selfie with you?” Caitlyn asked.
“Sure,” Summer agreed.
Rather than selfies, I ended up taking the photos with their cameras. Julie even joined for a few of them. Summer dutifully posed and smiled with everyone, and then we said our good-byes and got back into the car.
“Mr. Brock hurt his leg last night,” I said as we pulled back onto the access road. “When the guys and I were chasing the prowlers out by the dig site, one of them hurt themselves badly. We heard it.”
“And you think it was Mr. Brock?” Summer asked. “He’s old.”
“That doesn’t mean he can’t be a criminal. He was in awfully good shape for an old person. All of them are.”
“You’re proposing they’re a gang of geriatric dinosaur thieves?”
“It’s possible. His son was here the night of the theft—and he works in moving and storage. Maybe he could have helped. Like providing a moving van.”
“They would still have had to get the skull to the van in the first place,” Summer reminded me. “And they were all at dinner the night Minerva was stolen. Everyone from the dig was—except Jeb Weems. So really, he was the only one who could have been involved.”
“Unless Julie was lying about him not being there to make him sound guilty.”
“And why would she do that?”
“To hide her own guilt, maybe…”
“So now you think the mom and the girls stole Minerva? Even though they have an airtight alibi?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know what to think.”
“Well, I do. Jeb Weems is the only one without an alibi for the night of the theft, and he’s the cousin of Harper Weems, who is rich and smart enough to figure out how to pull off a crime like this. Plus, you found a pen from Weems Aerospace at the dig site, Jeb vanished mysteriously right after the crime was revealed—and everyone says he was a weirdo.”
I considered all that, then nodded in agreement. “All right. He’s definitely our best suspect.”
“We ought to call Sheriff Esquivel and let him know what we’ve found.”
“I don’t think Sheriff Esquivel wants to hear from us.”
“What about the other police officer, then? Officer Brewster?”
“She doesn’t want to hear from us either.”
Summer gave me a disappointed look. “Well, we have to tell someone.”
“I’m only saying they won’t listen to me. Esquivel doesn’t even think a crime has been committed, and Brewster has her own theories.”
“Like what?”
I considered whether or not to reveal who Brewster’s number-one suspect was, but didn’t want to upset Summer. So I lied instead. “I don’t know. She wouldn’t share them with me.”
Summer took out her phone. “I’m calling anyhow. Maybe they’ll…” She trailed off, noticing a text she had missed while we were at the pool. Her face immediately soured. “Oh.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I just found out who the police really suspect: They’ve issued an arrest warrant for my father.”
18 THE WARRANT
A showdown was taking place in front of the FunJungle administration building when Summer and I arrived.
The admin building was in the employee section of the park, which tourists couldn’t access. It was eight stories, which made it the tallest building for miles in any direction. J.J. McCracken’s offices were on the top floor, although the building also housed executives for everything from park design to public relations to the legal division.
FunJungle security was blocking the front doors to the building, facing off against Sheriff Esquivel, Officer Brewster, and eight other police officers, which was probably the entire force for the county. It occurred to me that if the local criminals knew about this, they could be robbing the town blind.
Chief Hoenekker, who ran FunJungle security, stood directly in front of the doors, flanked by his team. Beside him was Pete Thwacker, the head of public relations, and Marge O’Malley. Hoenekker was rumored to be ex-military, and he certainly looked it, from his meticulous uniform to his perfect crew cut. Pete Thwacker was dressed for the TV cameras, as usual, in a bespoke three-piece suit. Marge O’Malley’s arm was in a cast, due to her fall into the otter pit the day before.
The local press was also there. FunJungle was the biggest tourist attraction in that part of Texas, and virtually anything that happened there made the news, whether it was the birth of a new monke
y or a rise in the price of soft drinks. So of course they had shown up. There were four camera crews and a dozen local reporters.
A large crowd of FunJungle employees had gathered, eager to see what was happening: maintenance staff, food service workers, veterinarians, keepers, and a few of the people who acted as FunJungle mascots. The actors had ditched the heads of their costumes so that they could see better; the disembodied heads were lying on the ground nearby, like someone had guillotined an elephant, a zebra, and an exceptionally large koala.
Summer and I had come there directly after hearing the news about her father. She had tried calling J.J. directly, but he was understandably busy, so she had then tried her mother, who had told us the story: Sheriff Esquivel’s entire case against J.J. was based upon two pieces of evidence: (1) J.J. had known about Minerva and been in contact with the Bonotto family about buying the skeleton, and (2) J.J. had been in contact with a shady fossil dealer named Dmitri Kleskovich.
This last piece of evidence was news to Summer—and to her mother as well. Both assumed it had to be wrong.
As we arrived, Pete Thwacker was in the midst of making an official statement to the reporters, reading off a press release. “While it is true that we at FunJungle Wild Animal Park have been trying to obtain a dinosaur skeleton to enhance our award-winning immersive dinosaur experience at World of Reptiles, J.J. McCracken has never engaged the services of any criminal fossil dealers…”
“Oh boy,” Summer said to me. “I guess Minerva’s theft isn’t a secret anymore.”
“Then how do you explain this phone record from two weeks ago?” Sheriff Esquivel demanded, holding up a piece of paper. “It clearly shows a call from J.J. McCracken’s offices to Dmitri Kleskovich, who has been accused of multiple counts of fossil smuggling!”
If Pete Thwacker was unsettled or caught off-guard by this, he didn’t show it. Instead, he maintained his usual cool gravitas for the cameras. “Thousands of calls are made from J.J. McCracken’s offices every day. That is not proof that J.J. McCracken spoke to Mr. Kleskovich and it is definitely not proof that Mr. Kleskovich’s services were engaged—”
