Bone Hunter

by Sarah Andrews

  I HAVEN’T MUCH to report in the way of findings from that day at the conference. I spent a lot of time getting my bearings, a thing I would have been doing even if my agenda hadn’t shifted from “make professional contacts” to the more urgent “remove self from list of murder suspects.” Professional conferences are like that. They’re overwhelming, an overload of incoming information, and one must first figure out how to crack into them before one can truly be involved.

  So after perusing a bunch of books, maps, and T-shirts that the Utah Friends of Paleontology were selling by the registration desk, then checking out a plenary session on the cladistical analysis of tetrapodal amniotes that was being held in the ballroom, I found my way down the hill to a huge rubber tent like the ones they use to winterize tennis courts. I decided that this must be the events tent the weaselly Vance had spoken of the day before. The program listed it as the place where the poster sessions were being held. Poster sessions are minimeet-ings where scientists put up elaborate displays showing the results of their current research on big wide easels and then wait nervously to discuss their investigations with anyone who comes milling by. Officer Raymond followed along nonchalantly about forty feet behind me, trying to look like a paleontologist. The jeans and cowboy boots were a nice touch, but he should have lost the SALT LAKE 2002 OLYMPICS T-shirt in favor of something featuring bones and multisyllabic Latin names; he would have done better yet if he’d skipped shaving that morning, had stayed up all night doing something unhealthy, and had perfected the art of looking distracted by intellectual obsessions. When he entered the tent, he melted off into the crowd elsewhere, presumably making himself popular by asking participants if they had a motive for murder.

  The thick clouds that had been sliding in between the peaks that towered over Snowbird chose that moment to shed rain. It started as a gentle tattoo on the vinyl dome of the tent, then rose quickly to the drumming of hail. I glanced overhead at the big translucent panels that let in light, to see if they were going to hold the load. Great trains of tiny hailstones gathered, warmed against the fabric, and began to slide groundward. I relaxed and moved on into the catacombs of posters.

  I was just glazing over from looking at a display discussing the Eocene vole taxonomy of Montana when I spotted the sharp-faced woman I had noticed the day before. She was noticeable because she was anomalous: Geoscientists are, on the whole, an inelegant bunch, more partial to a “fresh air” look than anything one might see on Fifth Avenue. This woman was strictly Fifth, from her short, dark, classy coiffure to the au courant cut of her tiny pumps. Moreover, she wore makeup, and lots of it, mascara and eyeliner by the bucketload, laid on with artistry and flair. Her eyes were as prominent as her long, arcing nose to begin with, and the cosmetics brought them to within an inch of being overwhelming. I couldn’t guess her age closer than a range—somewhere between thirty and forty. She passed a thin pink tongue between her dark red lips. “So, ya int’r’sted in tracks?” she asked in a heavy Long Island accent.

  “Sure,” I said, “tell me about tracks.”

  She made an adenoidal throat-clearing sound, very demure, and began her spiel. “What we got hea’ is multiple trackways in the Blackhawk Formation. Cretaceous, y’know.”

  I nodded.

  She gestured toward a blowup of an oblique view down the ceiling of one long corridor inside a coal mine, with an investigator wearing a hard hat with a miner’s lamp for scale. The coal—the remnant of an ancient swamp—had been removed, revealing above it the sandstone formed when an ancient river levee had ruptured and spewed sand into the swamp. The sand had filled in footprints left by dinosaurs that had grazed through the swamp, dining on the canopies of the trees that grew there. Here and there, the carbonized remnants of the trees themselves were present in the form of fallen logs and even the spreading roots of a tree still standing. The footsteps were broad and round, each individual impression an almost nondescript knob of sand, but in aggregate, they were so consistently shaped and spaced that they could only have been formed by a striding animal of titanic proportions.

  “Okay,” the track specialist said, “we got adult ornithopods here. See the basically round print with the li’l bump on the front, like it’s giving ya the finger?” She pointed at a close-up. Yep, old dinny’d had a middle toe that stuck out farther than the rest.

  “Ornithopod. That’s like a dinosaur?”

  She gave me a sharp look that said, Amateur, huh? and said, “Yep-per. Ovah here, I got the probable species.” She pointed at an artist’s reconstruction of a very docile-looking creature with legs like pillars, a body like an immense rugby ball, and a neck and tail like snakes.

  “You give the tracks a separate Latin name from the track maker.”

  “Of course. With fossil tracks, you don’t know who made ’em unless you got the body fossil right there with its feet stuck right in the sand, right? So we don’t have that. So we got to reconstruct it, like, from the bones and from probable tonnage and so forth. So the tracks get a separate Latin name. Here, see? Real nice. Catchy, huh? Yeah.” She sniffed, working those adenoids in the dry mountain air. She seemed bored, like I was at least the fortieth person to walk up and peer ignorantly at her maps and photographs.

  She was irreverent. I liked that in a woman. I smiled. “Okay, so tell me about this picture.” I pointed to a photograph that on first inspection appeared to be of any old pile of sandstone boulders. Wildflowers and rabbitbrush leaned in from the edges, but within the area of interest, all rubble underneath a projecting slab had been removed, revealing one huge footprint knob made by a three-toed animal. The photographer had waited for the perfect sun angle, a low glancing brush of light that would pick up every irregularity.

  “That’s uppermost Morrison Formation, or lowermost Cedar Mountain, depending on where you call your boundary. That was taken at the Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry. People been digging up bones for half a century before we noticed them.”

  “Interesting. So what’s the latest on the paleoenvironment of the Morrison?” I asked. “Isn’t that the domain of Pete Peterson and Christine Turner?”

  Ms. Bored sat up a little straighter. “You a stratigrapher?” she asked, checking out my name tag. She was referring to those geologists who specialize in the interpretation of layers of rock laid down by wind, water, and other natural processes.

  “Sort of. I work in oil and gas. When I’m not doing forensic work.”

  “Oh, yeah, you’re the one.” She sniffed distractedly and looked away, as if she talked to murder suspects every day and so what else is new, like?

  “Yeah. I got lucky. So I’m just vacationing here in bone land,” I said, being equally blase. “Em Hansen.” I glanced at the lead panel of her poster layout. It informed me that she was from one of the prestigious universities back east.

  She twisted her head to one side in a gesture of casualness. “Allison Lee. Yeah, Christine and Pete and that gang from the Geological Survey have been working on this formation since I was in high school. They’re just synthesizing the new big picture now.”

  “So you been working dinosaurs long?” I asked, kind of girl-to-girl, now that we’d established how cool we both were.

  “Yeah. Bones, the bigger and older the better. Tracks and traces, eggs, nests, all that stuff. Kind of different for a girl from Lawn Guyland, but what you gonna do? My grampa took me into the city to the Museum of Natchul History when I was eight, and I was hooked. After that, it was every Saturday I could get him to take me back there, or up to Yale to the Peabody Museum, or please, Grampa, please let’s go to Wyoming, or out here to Utah, or Denver, or any of them places. He was a nice guy. He had bucks. He took me to every major dinosaur museum in America by the time I was in college, and then he was nice enough to pay for that.”

  “Girls didn’t go to college in your family?”

  “Not so’s you’d notice it.” She gazed at me languidly, settling on my left hand. “But what’s marriage when you can study one-
hundred-fifty-million-year-old tracks? So what did you do to your finguh there?”

  “Slammed it in the kitchen door.”

  “See? Kitchens are dangerous places.”

  “Don’t I know it. Give me sandstone and the open spaces any day,” I said wryly, completing our discreet bit of girl bonding. And I stared at my thumb a moment, turning my hand palm up and then down again, still amazed at the fresh gauze Ray had put on it when we’d reached his car.

  “So you were staying at George’s house when he got killed,” she said bluntly. “Was that ugly or what?”

  “It wasn’t anything,” I replied, happy to have someone to confide my great big nothing in. “He just took off early yesterday morning, and the next thing I know, the police are at the door asking what’s up.” I shrugged. “I hardly knew the guy. He just called me out of the blue one day and told me about this conference and invited me to attend. I’d heard of him, so I thought, Well, I like fossils as much as the next person, so why not? So then he offered me a place to stay. What can I say? I’m a cheapskate. I said yes. How was I supposed to know he was going to, er, end up dead? So. You know him well?”

  Now Allison shrugged. “Everybody knew George. It’s a small fraternity,” she drawled, building onto our woman-to-woman understanding.

  “He was a dinosaur type, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What was he working on?” I asked.

  “Oh, him? Carnivores. All them boys with the really big egos got to do something with sharp teeth. It’s a tick with them.”

  “Oh? Where was he working?” I continued. “Did he have a dig going somewhere?”

  “Do I know? George di’n’t take people out to his sites.”

  I cocked my head to one side. “I thought it took a lot of people to work a dinosaur site. I mean, like I watched one on TV, you know? Lots of rock to move, and the bones themselves weigh a lot, right?”

  A veil seemed to drop over Allison Lee’s intelligent eyes. She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “So he liked to work alone, not show anyone anything until he had it in the bag or something.” Her eyes glowed a little more brightly again as her lips curved slightly and she said, “You got to put a guy like that out of your head. Yeah, so he got you with the old ‘star speaker at the big symposium’ line. Hey, he does that every year. Poor ugly George always had to have a babe on his arm. Poor you, you got snookered. Get over it; you got some pretty classy company.”

  “You mean—”

  “Me?” she said, placing a delicate hand across her breast. “Sure, I’m a sucker, but he didn’t like city girls. He goes for au naturel types like you.”

  “He ever married?”

  “Him? Who’d marry him? He had a love affair with himself!”

  “You didn’t like him much.”

  “Who did? Okay, so he screwed my college roommate.”

  “So you mean he was a Don Juan?”

  “Huh? No, not that kind of screwed. I mean like screwed her over. Promised her he could get her all sorts of prestige and assistance if she got into this particular program at a particular school. She applied. She got in. Turned out he wasn’t even affiliated with the department, let alone the university. She’d already packed up and moved there, at some expense, and, like, who was going to fund her research? Nobody, once she was dumb enough to open her yap to the department and say, ‘Where’s George?’ They already hated the bastard over some other gag he’d pulled.”

  “But why do that? What did it gain him?”

  “You got me. Maybe it was his way of jerking off, or he just lost track of who he’d told what. Or maybe he saw her as some kind of threat and thought he’d mess with her. Either way, it really hurt her feelings and got her off on the wrong foot professionally. So I like the idea of him down there hoppin’ on hot coals.” She pointed toward hell.

  “Was he any kind of a scientist?”

  “Who knew? We never got to see his sites, remember?”

  “But he worked carnivores, you said.”

  “Yeah, but we never saw his evidence.”

  “You mean he was maybe inventing things?”

  “No … he had photographs of prepared stuff, but that’s all he’d show anybody. Most other people at least keep their bones in a known collection somewhere, like at a museum, so everybody can see them and draw their own conclusions. But not George.”

  “Where do you think he put them, then, if he was digging them up?”

  She shrugged again, beginning to look a little bit nervous maybe to be giving up so much information. “Try his basement.” She looked down the long aisle formed by the nearest two rows of poster easels, as if willing someone else to come by and interrupt our conversation.

  George’s basement. A big empty nothing. “But he published his findings. Right?”

  “Oh, come on. You call that publishing? Sure, he published; he spread it all through the newspapers and magazines. If you asked him, he’d tell you he only published in popular magazines because they got his results out faster, but he knew better than to present his data where it could be scrutinized.”

  I knew this kind of talk. It was how scientists badmouthed each other without going on record as having done so. It was a dicey business for a scientist to call a colleague a slob: a sort of “she who has not analyzed evidence wrong may cast the first stone” proposition. “But no one drummed him out of the corps?” I asked.

  Allison began to squirm a little, as if her blouse had started to make her itch. Evading eye contact, she said, “So who was he working for? No one.”

  Playing devil’s advocate, I said, “But he had a doctorate.”

  Allison sighed disgustedly. “Yeah, he had his doc all right. He had a job for a while, too, but he didn’t get tenured. Like I say, he did some quickie science.”

  “But wait, isn’t he teaching at the university here?”

  “That, he would like you to think. Lissen, this sort of thing happens sometimes; he had a nice dissertation, but then, well …”

  I didn’t let it go. “So what are we saying here? Was he with a museum? Maybe he was working independently on a grant?”

  “Nope. Nada. Bubkes. Nothing.”

  “Huh. So how’d he make a living?”

  Allison leaned pointedly away from me, willing someone else to walk up to her easel and drive me away. “Got me.”

  “Funny, he had a house and all. I mean, it wasn’t like he was renting a studio apartment or something. And aren’t houses getting expensive here in Salt Lake?”

  She cocked her head to one side distractedly, a Who knows? gesture.

  “So George was in Vietnam,” I said.

  “Was he?” she said, yawning.

  “Yeah. There was a photograph of him with some helicopter buddies. He still see them?” I was thinking, of course, of the man with the high cheekbones and the frightening eyes. Frightening to me now as much because he bore a resemblance to the man who had followed me the night before, and shot at me.

  “Who knows what kind of people George hung out with? He liked the limelight, all right, but then you didn’t hear from him for months. He was a carny act.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean, guys like that, you don’t see the real guy. You see what they want to show you.”

  “Tell me more.”

  Allison now looked anywhere but at me. I had pushed the line of questioning entirely too far.

  I steered quickly onto other ground, hoping to get just an ounce more information from her. “So what about your roommate. Did she—”

  “Lissen, you want to know what you need to know about George Dishey, you should go on Sherbrooke’s field trip tomorrow.”

  “There’s a field trip tomorrow? I didn’t see it in the program.”

  “Nah, it’s his big surprise. But the jungle telegraph has been busy, and everyone knows something’s up. Like I say, it’s a small fraternity.”

  I thought for a moment. “So why is it I want to go
on this field trip?”

  “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

  “Okay, fine, I’ll see about signing up. So are you telling me Dishey and Sherbrooke worked together on stuff?”

  Allison laughed—a quick, humorless grunt. “Not those two. Not hardly.”

  “So then—”

  We were interrupted as Allison leaned forward to offer her fingertips to be shaken by a passing colleague. “Howie, nice to see ya. My love to Gwen. Ya wanna see my latest tracks?”

  The man smiled pleasantly, made a vague hand gesture, but moved on by.

  I began again. “So Dishey and Sherbrooke—”

  “Okay, you want to know about Dishey and Sherbrooke? They roomed together at Yale. It was a little before my time. Go ask someone who was there. Better yet, ask Dan to explain it to you.” Allison made a swatting gesture, as if flies were buzzing in front of her face. “Go on the field trip. You can’t ride that bus without hearing all the dirt you could hope to dig in a month of poster sessions.”

  “Your roommate,” I said. “Did she—”

  Allison stood up and turned away from me. “Lost track of her.”

  “Oh.” My heart sagged in my chest. I had succeeded in making this woman uncomfortable. And I had begun to descend into a dim, fusty world, a land of resentments and petty bitternesses, a circle lower into hell than I had meant to travel. I tried to focus my mind on the faces of other people who stood here and there among the easels, bending their highly trained minds toward their favorite topics of intellectual pursuit. As I observed them, I realized that I also was being observed: About forty feet away, standing near a display I’d passed earlier on the adaptive morphology of the pachyce-phalosaurids, stood Earthworm Magritte, the stump-shaped man who had declared it high time that George Dishey left the planet. He was watching me closely, stone-faced, and with concentrated interest, as if I were a movie.