Bone Hunter

by Sarah Andrews

  At length, the coffee break we’d interrupted broke up and people confusedly meandered back into the symposium that actually was scheduled for that afternoon, something about predator-prey ratios in the Mesozoic. I tried to listen to one of the talks, but I realized that, for the moment, the revised cladistics of early Triassic diapsid quadrupeds and its relationship to a hot lunch was a bit too abstract for my overstimulated mind to grasp.

  Officer Raymond drove me back to George Dishey’s house after first phoning ahead to the police station to confirm that I was free to go home. Except, of course, that George Dishey’s house was not my home.

  On the way down the mountain, Officer Raymond began to pick my brains. “No one appeared to be withholding evidence,” he said.

  “Scientists specialize in evidence,” I replied with no small pride. “And we know all about coughing it up when the time is right. Professional ethics require that we make a clean presentation of the facts. Or at least what we consider the facts to be.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “We’re talking about a bunch of people whose careers depend on being the first with the latest,” I replied, “And think about it: They’re dealing with scanty records of animals who’ve been dead a long time. At least you cops get a fresh corpse.”

  “Can you enlarge on that?” he asked, his voice tightening.

  I stared at his handsome profile, wondering for the sixth or seventh time what condition George Dishey’s corpse must have been found in to warrant such sensitivity. Police officers saw the results of violent death as frequently as anybody. They grew inured to it. What could have gotten them so stirred up about this one? I considered asking him, but it didn’t take a genius to know that the police weren’t going to budge with the information. The more distinctive the mode of death, the more carefully they would conceal it from the public, and that public included me. That way, they could weed through the crank calls and nutcase confessions that would soon be finding their ways through the police switchboard, and if they found someone who could accurately describe the techniques required to create the gruesome evidence, they would know they had a winner.

  I knew that for the moment, I had to content myself with being forthcoming, in hopes of convincing the professionals of my innocence. I fell back into being a fountain of wisdom. “Back at college, I took a class in paleontology, and the dinosaur stuff was pretty interesting,” I began, already embellishing the truth. My undergraduate course had covered fossils from A, for algal mounds, to Z, for—well, not for dinosaurs. We had spent a few days on dinosaurs, but I had read a little since—Jack Horner’s Dinosaur Lives, Dave Gillette’s Seismosaurus, and a few others—and had seen a few television specials. “The thing is that in order to fossilize a dinosaur, you have to bury it really quickly. Otherwise, all the other dinosaurs—or at least, the carnivorous ones—will eat it and scatter its bones. In order to bury something that big that quickly, the best bet is to have it die in a river; say, by drowning. That happened a lot.”

  Officer Raymond brought his squad car expertly down the wide turns that carried the highway past the red and gold foliage that would soon be a dead brown litter underneath the winter’s snows, past the myriad avalanche chutes that would soon be laden with deadly slabs of white death, and out of the mountains, his shoulders and arms moving with hypnotic grace. Now he merged onto a belt of highway that rushed us along the ancient broad lake terraces that formed the upper reaches of Salt Lake City. I couldn’t tell if he was listening to me or not.

  Filling the loneliness I was beginning to feel, I continued anyway. “Just think of modern elk herds crossing a river. The waters are swollen from a sudden storm. Something makes them stampede, perhaps a lightning bolt. They panic, push one dino brother into deeper water. Too deep, he loses his footing, can’t swim. Bam, drowned quadruped. So anyway, your dinosaur dies in the water where it has a chance of getting buried in the sand that’s being carried down the river, but then the water itself starts working on the corpse. It takes a lot of sand to bury one of these guys. Some of them weighed ten, twenty tons. So anyway, the carcass starts to rot, and the first thing that happens is the big joints start to come apart. The first thing that usually comes off is the head, then a leg. Particularly with some of the big brontosaurus-type herbivores. Their heads weren’t on all that tightly, and boing! Off it goes downstream. The flood’s over and the water level drops, and whang, some scavenger chews off another haunch. Maybe all that gets buried was part of one foreleg and a chunk of the backbone, and the rest gets eaten or ground up by rocks saltating downstream. Then you’ve got to wait a few hundred million years, hope what’s left isn’t so deeply buried that you’ll never find it or that it didn’t erode away a few hundred thousand years before you were born, and then wham, you’re out on your horse one day looking for a lost calf and maybe you get lucky and happen to spot it because the sun angle is just right. Then you’ve got to hope you know what a dinosaur bone actually is, and not confuse it with some old cow bone, or with the surrounding rock.”

  “Why would that happen?” he asked.

  “You mean, why would someone think it’s a cow bone?”

  “No, rock.”

  “It’s often the same color. The bone gets mineralized.”

  “Oh.” His gaze stayed trained on the roadway.

  I’d been making some pretty wild gestures as I spoke, typical of geologists and other geoscientists, like paleontologists. People make jokes about us. They say, If you want to make a room full of geologists shut up, tie their hands to their sides. Now my hands dropped to my lap and I cleared my throat. “I’m just saying that most of the time, here in human time, you find your corpse in one piece, and—” I stopped. Was that it? Had some fool dismembered George Dishey? My mind slipped out of intellectual mode and my stomach tightened. “Hey, just what happened to George, anyway?”

  We had exited onto city streets, still following the contours of the shores of Lake Bonneville, the Pleistocene inland sea that had drained and evaporated into the present-day shallow ghost of a sea called Great Salt Lake. We passed the University of Utah and maneuvered into the quiet old residential neighborhood beyond it where George Dishey had until this morning lived. Officer Raymond’s eyes were on a truck in front of us, his expression unreadable. “The house is down here on the right,” he said softly.

  I looked down the street. Two cars besides my own were parked in front of George Dishey’s house. We pulled up to the curb, got out, and walked up to the front door, which stood open in the early-evening warmth. I stepped inside. The evidence team was just finishing the task of searching the interior.

  I was blasted by a voice from one corner of the room. “Ah, the girl geologist, back from the bone conference!” I turned. Detective Bert straightened up from an examination of one of the many bookcases, and said, “How’d it go, Sherlock?”

  Ignoring his question, I hurried into the room where I had slept the night before. My suitcase was open, and my belongings, from blue jeans and sweaters down to the most intimate bits of flimsy, were laid out none too tidily on the bed. I opened my mouth to complain, then snapped it shut.

  “Oh, were those yours?” Bert asked unctuously from beyond the doorway.

  I gave him a look but kept my mouth shut. He had taken advantage of his mandate of searching the dead man’s house to go through my things, too.

  “Well, here’s your keys,” Bert said, dangling them from a finger. He oozed up to the doorjamb and draped his body insolently against the wood. “And here’s a spare key to the front door. Or do you plan to stay?”

  My back molars nearly cracked under the compression of my jaw muscles. I wasn’t going anywhere, not if this man wanted me to leave.

  He said, “You keep in touch, hear?”

  I advanced on him, determined to back him out of my room and out of that house. And he did leave, grinning all the way with that sick way of his that had no heart behind it. I had slammed the front door before I
realized that Officer Raymond was still inside with me. “Excuse me,” I said, yanking the door open again. “I’m, um, sorry.” I needed him to leave—immediately. It had been a gruelling day, I was a long way from home and anyone I could call a friend, and my cut thumb was beginning to throb like someone was hitting it with a hammer. If he didn’t leave fast, he was going to have to watch me cry.

  “You okay here?” he asked.

  “Fine. Just fine.”

  He handed me a card. It read “Salt Lake City Police,” had a logo, his full name, Officer Thomas B. Raymond, and a phone number. “You call me if … well, you know, if you think of anything else that would help the investigation, or if you … you know, need anything.”

  “Sure,” I said. I knew he was trying to be chivalrous, but knowing that his real reason to stay in touch with me was something else again—to solve a crime and maybe get a promotion out of it—left me feeling deflated, like I was somebody’s kid sister whose company was more a chore than a pleasure.

  “You got food in the house?”

  “I … I’ll go out if I need anything.”

  “You-”

  “I’m fine, damn it!”

  Officer Raymond observed me for some seconds, then turned, nodded good-bye, and left. The door closed slowly behind him.

  Through the windows, I saw him walk down the lawn toward the street. His lean, limber body flexed gracefully with the unconscious motion of walking. When he reached his squad car, he paused for a while with his hand on the handle of the door, his eyes closed, his face set in an expression of solemnity. I thought I saw his lips move, as if he were speaking to someone who was standing quite near to him. After a moment, he climbed into the car and drove away.

  I watched the empty parking space for seconds that stretched into minutes, feeling more lonely than I’m used to feeling when I’m alone. I considered getting into my rental car and driving back up to Snowbird. They would be having dinner now, listening to someone blather away about something of great interest to bone junkies. What had been on the menu? I shook myself. Prime rib. I couldn’t stand the idea of eating, much less of putting a knife to freshly killed flesh.

  5

  SGT. CARLOS ORTEGA ANSWERED THE PHONE AT HIS mother’s house, where I caught him in the middle of dinner. “Em,” he murmured, “Mama has made menudo. Can I call you back?”

  My heart sank. “Sure,” I said, in a voice that must have sounded like a condemned prisoner acquiescing from the top step of the gallows.

  I heard his sigh in return. “Momentito, amiga, while I stretch the phone cord to the table here. Okay. That’s good.” To his littlest brother, he said, “Oye, Salvador, pasame las tortillas, por favor,” and then back to me: “Okay. Okay. So what is wrong in your life, my friend?”

  “Is it that obvious something’s wrong?”

  With an ironic tone, Ortega said, “These many years I know you, amiga. You think yourself awkward, but in fact you consider my feelings at most times, como una señora muy fina. But here you are calling at my dinner hour. I am a detective, no? It is my job to notice things.” He took a noisy slurp of his stew, pacing out this dissertation. “And you have many ways you express yourself. Tonight, it is what you are not saying. You are not saying that you are calling larga distancia, something you have done only when your heart has found trouble. But no, this is not even deduction. I know you are not home because I saw your landlady today, and she informs me you are out of town. ¿Verdad?”

  “Verdad.” In the four years I had known Carlos Ortega, our conversation had developed its own pattern and pace and had increasingly become studded with Spanish. Moreover, he was within the bliss of his mother’s cooking, and at such times he reverted to the mannerly, elegant language of his childhood. My landlady Betty would have been his source of lunch. Much to my growing discomfort, she and Carlos had become … ah, friends. “Yes, I am calling from Salt Lake City.”

  “And the weather is nice?”

  “Lovely.”

  “But you are sad.” His voice wrapped me in sympathy.

  My vision began to swim. I fought to hold back the tears that wanted to flow. “Yes,” I whispered. Yes, I am sad. And it’s not just what’s happened today. It’s whom I’ve met.

  “So speak to me. Tell me what makes tu corazon to ache.”

  A drop rolled down my cheek. Another. To stanch the downpour, I said something that would raise my anger. “I’ve been arrested.”

  I heard his spoon hit the table. “¿Que? iAmiga! ¿Por qué!”

  “Well, I don’t mean arrested, exactly; they didn’t have enough to hold me on. No, that’s not right. I’m saying this all wrong, but I’m their prime suspect. I mean—they didn’t call you?” It hit me all at once: This was news to him. Now I really was angry.

  “iPare! iPare! ¿Por qué es su—” With an effort, he shook himself back out of Spanish. “What were the charges?”

  “Um. Ah. Murder.”

  “iAy, caramba! No, this a joke. ¿Verdad?”

  “No. I was staying at this guy’s house and now he’s dead, and they caught me—well …” I took a deep breath and told him the whole weird story about locking myself out of the house.

  Carlos hammered me with questions, rapid-fire, until he was satisfied that he had the essentials. “Name of the deceased.”

  “George Dishey.”

  “How did you know him?”

  “I didn’t. I’d just met him. Well, you see, he’d heard about me. About the work I—you and I—had done together. About me helping your police investigations with my geology. I don’t know who told him, but I begin to be known, you know? I mean, petroleum geologists are a dime a dozen, but forensic geologists are really something—or that’s what he said. And I wanted to hear that. So I’m just a bachelor’s degree with only a few years’ experience. So I’m no one from nowhere. I thought it would be nice just once—”

  Carlos interrupted. “No es importante, querida. Just tell me how he contacted you.”

  “He just called me up out of a clear blue sky one day and told me about this conference, and of course I knew who he was, and at first I thought it must be someone playing a prank, because he’s like on TV and in the magazines and all.”

  “But it was him, and you were honored.”

  “Flattered,” I said bitterly. How easily I had let George convince me to come. I knew that big names don’t necessarily mean big hearts, but by the time I’d arrived in Salt Lake, I’d built George up into a secretly nice guy whom no one but me could really understand. Hah. And now here I was deciding that this cop was the next solution to all my longings. When was I going to learn?

  Carlos smacked his lips over another spoonful of his menudo. “Continue.”

  “So he told me about how he was going to have a session on forensic geology at this conference, because part of what a paleontologist does is he figures out how the fossil died. Because you see, they’re all dead. The animals a paleontologist works with. And plants. That’s what distinguishes paleontologists from biologists, I guess.” I had seen Carlos only last Wednesday but hadn’t told him about the conference, or the talk. Why had I held out on him? Had I on some level smelled a rat?

  “So you hadn’t met him before you arrived for the conference.

  “Right.”

  “You saw the body?”

  “No. And thank God. It must have been a mess.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “The cops are really upset. These guys are taking this one personally.”

  “Ayii,” Carlos whined, signifying the depth of trouble I was in. Then, finally calming down enough to start eating again, he asked, “Where are you now?”

  “At his house.”

  “This dead person’s?”

  “Sí.”

  “This George Dishey’s?”

  “Corecto.”

  “Aiyii. No es bueno. Aiyii.”

  “Aiyii what?”

  Carlos muttered under his breath for a momen
t. “Forget I said anything. You go and have a good life.”

  “Carlos, what kind of mierda—”

  “No! I offer no advice! Each time I try to help you, you do the opposite! I take no responsibility!”

  “Yes, but this time—”

  “You don’t know who killed this man. What if—”

  “Don’t worry, Carlos. If you were trying to get away with murder, would you drop by your victim’s house to make sure you got noticed? No. It’s probably the safest place I could be. No te preocupe. Besides, the police are all over me. They even assigned a guy to take me up to the conference.” I was overstating this, I knew, but I wanted to convince myself as well as Carlos. “He and two or ten of his pals are probably down the block right now, waiting for me to make a move, sitting there in their unmarked cars, drinking Postum.”

  “Postum?”

  “Yeah, this is a Mormon town. Try getting a decent cup of coffee around here. Most places it’s no caffeine, no smokes, no liquor harder than three-two beer.”

  Carlos slurped his cerveza obnoxiously.

  I said, “This prime suspect thing totally sucks.”