Tyrannosaurus Wrecks

by Stuart Gibbs

  Summer rolled her eyes. “Those guys are the world’s biggest idiots. For all we know, Rick didn’t even give them a cobra. It was probably a sock with googly eyes glued to it.”

  “If only. A sock puppet can’t kill anyone.” I turned to Lynda, who had just hung up the phone. “Do you have the number for whoever handles the venomous snake removals at FunJungle?”

  “Sure thing,” she said. “But if they find that cobra, they won’t bring it here.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “There’s no room for it. Do you have any idea how many requests FunJungle gets every day to take exotic animals off people’s hands?”

  “Dozens?” I guessed.

  “Hundreds,” Lynda corrected. “The operator catches most of the calls, but at least once a day, one makes its way through to me. Like J.J. McCracken has nothing better to do than adopt some knucklehead’s used alpaca.” She put a call on hold, then said, “From what I understand, even normal zoos get at least a few calls a day, but we’re FunJungle, the most famous zoo in the world. Everyone who has an exotic animal they no longer know what to do with calls us, thinking we can take it. And there’s a lot of people out there with exotic animals.”

  “Oh,” I said, surprised that I hadn’t known this.

  “Holy cow,” Summer said, looking at her phone. “Another copycat.”

  “Zebra spanker?” I asked.

  “Warthog kicker. Baltimore. Apparently, the guy didn’t know warthogs could fight with those tusks. He ended up in the hospital with a gouge in his leg.”

  “Serves him right,” Lynda said with a sigh. “Hopefully his wound will get infected.”

  “Can I go in and see Dad now?” Summer asked.

  “You can,” Lynda told her. “He’s always happy to see you. But as for you”—she turned her attention back to me—“this isn’t the best time. He’s on the phone with his attorneys. As you’re probably aware, he’s having a rough day.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  Lynda plucked a Post-it note off her desk. “While you’re here, though, it saves me the trouble of calling you. A friend of J.J.’s asked me to pass this on to you.” She held out the note.

  I took it from her, surprised anyone would go through J.J. McCracken to get to me. If anything, it seemed like things would work the other way around.

  I was even more surprised when I saw who the message was from. “This is serious?” I asked Lynda.

  “I talked to her myself,” she said.

  “Who’s it from?” Summer asked, intrigued.

  “Harper Weems,” I replied. “She wants to have dinner with me tonight.”

  20 THE OTHER BILLIONAIRE

  “To be honest,” Harper Weems said, “my cousin Jeb is a weirdo.”

  It turned out that lots of billionaires knew each other. They had summits and get-togethers in fancy resorts where they would all meet and hang out. Sometimes they talked about positive things, like how to best use their enormous resources to help poor people or the environment. And sometimes they talked about things that only billionaires could, like how to upholster the seats on their private jets or what might be a nice island to buy.

  So Harper Weems and J.J. McCracken knew each other, which was why, when Harper Weems wanted to talk to me, she asked J.J.’s office to pass the message along.

  Harper had a team of employees who handled her social media presence. They ghost-wrote her tweets and her blog posts and monitored how she was trending throughout the day. Thus, when Summer had accused Harper of stealing Minerva on live television—and then named me as the one who had uncovered the evidence—Harper had gotten wind of it right away. She had then called J.J., who had been keeping tabs on the news as well. They decided that J.J. would talk to Summer about why Harper was innocent, but Harper wanted to talk to me herself.

  As it turned out, Harper wasn’t too far away at the time. She had been visiting NASA’s Johnson Space Center south of Houston, where the astronauts trained and where the operations for the International Space Station and other missions were headquartered. From there, she was heading to Weems Aerospace’s private rocket testing facility, which was in northwest Texas. So it wasn’t a big detour for Harper to drop by FunJungle for dinner.

  To many people’s surprise, Harper Weems, the wunderkind who was revolutionizing the entire aerospace industry, was afraid to fly. (She was often asked how someone with aviophobia could build rockets that were designed to take people into space. She inevitably replied, “The mechanics of plane flight and rocket flight are completely different. I don’t want to fly like a bird. I want to visit the stars.”) Harper did have a private jet that she begrudgingly used when she had to go overseas, but for shorter jaunts, she traveled in a tricked-out recreational vehicle.

  The RV was called the Eagle 5, a reference to the flying Winnebago in Spaceballs, which was one of Harper’s favorite movies. It was painted jet-black, with a custom-designed web of lights sheathing it that allowed Harper to make the RV look like almost anything she wanted to at night: a spaceship, a herd of elephants, one of the giant carnivorous alien worms from Dune. The Eagle 5 was a cultural phenomenon. Harper’s social media specialists would send out alerts when it was about to pass through a town, and people had been known to line up along the roads hours ahead of time, waiting to see it.

  However, the interior of the Eagle 5 was kept a secret. There were plenty of rumors about how Harper had decorated it. Fans thought it looked like the inside of the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars, or the Nostromo from Alien, or even a 1970s disco. But only the few lucky people invited aboard knew what it really looked like—and all of them were sworn to secrecy.

  My parents and I were among those lucky people.

  I had thought my parents might balk at our having dinner with Harper. After all, she was a potential suspect in a crime. But to my surprise, Mom hadn’t merely been okay with the plan; she had been thrilled. I had always known my mother was impressed by Harper Weems, but I had never realized how much until that night. She was a complete fangirl, so excited that she could barely sit still at dinner.

  The Eagle 5 was parked in the employee lot for FunJungle, which was a five-minute walk from our trailer in employee housing. There were no dinner options for fifteen miles except the restaurants at FunJungle, most of which only served fast food. So Harper had invited us to dine on the Eagle 5.

  Since Harper didn’t want to attract attention, the running lights on the Eagle 5 were turned off, so that it looked like a normal RV in the night. In fact, thanks to its dark paint job, it barely looked like anything; it was almost invisible in the parking lot.

  As for the top-secret interior, it was designed like… a recreational vehicle. There was nothing space-age or sci-fi about it. “Honestly, there’s not much you can do inside an RV,” Harper had explained. “My designers came up with a few cool ideas, but they would have made the interior even more cramped than it already is.” So Harper had simply stuck with the original design. She had upgraded the furnishings, putting a nicer bed in the master bedroom and fancy wallpaper in the bathroom, but it was just lipstick on a pig. We were obviously inside an RV.

  It was still as nice as an RV could get, though. The Eagle 5 was the top-of-the-line model, with modules that could extend out from the sides while it was parked, greatly increasing the room inside. And Harper’s staff, which included two butlers and a gourmet cook, had followed in a second RV, which was outfitted with a gourmet kitchen. Thus, my family and I were being treated to a dinner of sustainable poached salmon in a lemon piccata sauce, along with locally sourced vegetables and freshly baked bread.

  “Jeb has always been the odd duck of the family,” Harper explained during dinner. “If anyone was going to go to the dark side, it’s him.”

  “So you think he stole the skull?” Mom asked excitedly, hanging on every word Harper said.

  “Not a chance,” Harper replied. “He might have thought about it, but there’s no way Jeb could pull anyt
hing like that off. The guy screws up everything. He’s a complete nerf herder. Which is why I’m now implicated in this crazy scheme.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  Harper popped a forkful of salmon in her mouth. She had short hair cropped in a pixie cut, and was casually dressed in ripped jeans and a vintage Star Wars T-shirt. Even though she was worth at least a billion dollars, it looked like she had spent less on her clothes than I had. “Look, it’s no secret that I’m successful, right? While Jeb is not. The guy barely finished high school, flunked out of college, and can’t hold a job. But I’m his cousin, so he figures I’m his ticket to success. And I’ll admit, I’ve been generous with family. I’m the one who bought him that camper. But that wasn’t enough for him. He’s always doing things to try to curry favor with me. And somewhere along the line, I might have told him I was in the market for a dinosaur.”

  “You only mean a skeleton, right?” Dad asked warily. “Because you’ve talked about bringing dinosaurs back, like in Jurassic Park.”

  “I said it would be fun to bring them back,” Harper clarified. “But I never said it would be a good idea. Jurassic Park definitely shows there’s a downside to pushing science too far. So sadly, no real living velociraptors or allosaurs for me. But I would definitely love to have a skeleton. Preferably a large theropod. Because, one: Theropods are awesome. And two: I can’t fit a brachiosaurus in my house.” She took a last bite of her dinner and shoved the plate away.

  One of her butlers was standing at the ready. He immediately stepped forward, took the dirty plate, and whisked it off to the other RV to be cleaned.

  Harper went on. “Full disclosure: I did not go about trying to get a dinosaur the right way… at first. I didn’t realize there were all these shady fossil hunters, and the first guy I tracked down turned out to be one of the shadiest: Dmitri Kleskovich.”

  “The guy the police say J.J. McCracken called?” I asked.

  “One and the same,” Harper agreed. “In my defense—and J.J.’s—the guy markets himself well. And there aren’t too many people out there claiming they can get you a T. rex. Which should have been a red flag, I suppose. I reached out to the guy, and he gave me the hard sell, saying that whatever I wanted, he could get, but when I did a little more digging, a lot of what he’d told me didn’t hold water. On the surface, Dmitri has kept his nose clean. He’s never been officially busted for a crime. But he has close ties to a lot of people who have been busted. The whole fossil business turns out to be a treacherous hive of scum and villainy.”

  “Star Wars,” Mom said, recognizing the quote. “How’s it so bad?”

  “It’s kind of been bad since the beginning.” Harper held out her wine glass to her second butler, who promptly refilled it. “Back in the 1880s, there were these two rival paleontologists, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Marsh. Cope worked for the Academy of Sciences in Philadelphia and Marsh worked for the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale. They ran all around the American West, grabbing as many fossils as they could and screwing each other over as much as possible. They hated each other. They stole from each other, sicced tribes of Native Americans on each other, and blasted each other in the press. And those guys were the forefathers of paleontology in this country.

  “Things calmed down a bit after a few decades. There was a general consensus that any big dinosaur discovery ought to go into a museum. But then rich folks started getting the idea that they would like a dinosaur too.”

  “Rich folks like you,” Dad pointed out.

  “Jack!” Mom exclaimed, looking embarrassed that Dad had just insulted our host.

  Harper wasn’t offended, though. She raised her hands above her head in surrender. “Charlene, Jack is right. I’m partly to blame. I’d heard of a few other people getting their hands on skeletons, so I made the mistake of publicly stating that I wanted one too. Only, I hadn’t done my research yet. Turns out, this influx of new cash has upended the whole system. Suddenly, fossils are worth big money, and when money is at stake, people start behaving very badly. Like this guy Kleskovich. He and other fossil raiders go into countries with far weaker laws than the US, bribe everyone they can, and make off with everything. Or worse, they let some other poor schmoes do the hard work digging the bones out, and then simply steal them.”

  “But Minerva wasn’t in another country,” I said. “She was right here. Are these thieves operating here, too?”

  “Until Minerva vanished, I didn’t think so,” Harper said. “Generally, the fossil hunters in America work more legitimately: They buy a property in an area known for being rich in fossils, and then basically mine it for parts. Technically, anything you find on your property belongs to you, even if it’s a dinosaur. Now, I’d heard of some small-time thefts: thieves getting into established sites and making off with a bone or two. But nothing like what happened with Minerva. I mean, a theft like that takes some serious guts—and some major brainpower.”

  “How do you think they did it?” Mom asked.

  Harper shrugged. “Beats me. I haven’t been out to the dig site, but I got the skinny from Jeb, and… man, it sounds impossible. I mean, I’m a certified genius and I can’t figure out how this happened.”

  “Jeb told you about the site?” Dad asked. “I thought you said he was acting on his own.”

  “He was. But when he called to tell me he’d stumbled across a T. rex, I had to listen. Ooh! Dessert!” Harper sat up excitedly as the first butler entered the RV bearing a warm apple pie and a tub of vanilla ice cream. “You guys left room for dessert, didn’t you?”

  “I did,” I said quickly.

  “Serve the young man,” Harper told the butler, then launched back into her explanation. “Jeb tracked down Minerva on his own. He had called a bunch of paleontology departments, looking for openings on digs, and this one was in the right place at the right time. He was told there was a wait list, but he dropped my name to jump the line. Universities tend to like to work with the cousins of people who can make big donations. I guess this Dr. Chen called him back and invited him on board, so he made a beeline across the country to help out. The moment he heard it was a T. rex, he flipped. He sent me like a dozen emails a day. I didn’t believe him at first because, well… Jeb gets a lot of things wrong. He once thought he was buying the original time-traveling DeLorean from Back to the Future and ended up with a Ford Pinto with vacuum cleaner parts welded to it. But after Dr. Chen and her team excavated the skull, Jeb sent me some photos, and… it was a T. rex, all right. So, I cracked. I called the Bonottos to ask if Minerva was on the market.”

  “You called the Bonottos?” I asked, surprised. Neither Sage nor his parents had mentioned that to me.

  “Oh yeah. And they told me that J.J. McCracken already had an interest in her. But they claimed they hadn’t made a deal yet, so if I wanted to make a higher bid, I was welcome to.”

  “So what happened?” Mom asked.

  “I called J.J.,” Harper said. “There’s no point in getting into a bidding war with a friend. I thought maybe we could work out some kind of arrangement.”

  “Like what?” I sat back from the table so the butler could place a slice of apple pie à la mode in front of me.

  “Don’t let that melt,” Harper told me. “Dig in.”

  I didn’t need to be told twice. It was delicious.

  “You mentioned an arrangement?” Dad asked, not about to let Harper change the subject.

  Harper’s mouth twitched, like maybe she wasn’t happy Dad had caught her. It took her a moment to collect her thoughts. “It never happened. J.J. and I talked, but then something came up and he had to go. And then I got all wrapped up in this rocket test I’m on my way to. Before I knew it, a week had slipped by. And then, suddenly, Minerva disappeared.”

  “And so did Jeb,” I added. “The very next day.”

  “Yes,” Harper said, resigned. Her butler started to place pie in front of her, but she pointed to Mom and Dad, indicating they ought
to get served first. “Like I said, he’s a dimwit. Jeb has a bit of a criminal record. He’s been busted for shoplifting a couple times, and once, he got arrested for public indecency. He thought he was on a nude beach, but it wasn’t. And so, when a crime occurred, he thought it would be best not to call attention to himself. So he took off, which was the perfect thing to do to call attention to himself. He’s just over the border in Mexico, lying low until the heat blows over on this. Nuevo Laredo, I think.”

  Mom dug into her pie and moaned. “Oh my. This is amazing.”

  “My pastry chef trained in Paris,” Harper said proudly.

  “You have your own pastry chef?” I asked, astonished.

  “It’s one of the best things about being a billionaire,” Harper told me. “Well, in the top hundred for sure.”

  Dad said, “Do you think Dmitri Kleskovich might have been involved in the theft of Minerva?”

  “It’s possible,” Harper conceded. “Although I’d be surprised. The guy usually plays it safe, and it’d be really ballsy to steal something in America. But then, this is a T. rex skull. Those are rarer than Vibranium. So maybe he thought it’d be worth the risk. I still have no idea how he would have done it, though.”

  “There must be other shady dealers besides Kleskovich,” Dad suggested. “Maybe it was one of them.”

  “Also possible,” Harper agreed.

  “Do you know who they might be?” I asked.

  “That’s not really my area of expertise, but hold on.” Harper called out, “Computer, get me the contact information for Arin Singh.”

  “Yes, Commander,” a computerized voice answered. “Sending it to your phone now.”

  A second later, Harper’s phone pinged as the information arrived.

  “Dr. Singh is one of the best paleontologists on the planet,” Harper told me. “And one of the leads on combating fossil theft. He was the one who warned me about working with Kleskovich. I’ll give you his number. Just call him up and mention my name. Maybe he even has an idea or two about who swiped Minerva. Only, don’t call until tomorrow morning. He’s on a dig in South Africa and it’s the middle of the night there.”