Bone Hunter

by Sarah Andrews

  “Gentlemen, ladies,” Sherbrooke said unguently, “thank you for your interest in our work. If you have any questions regarding our proceedings here, I am certain that this kind agent of the local media can arrange a proper forum from which we all might grow more, ah, enlightened. However, we do ask, if you wish to attend our conference, that you register at the front desk as the rest of us have done. The men and women who have assembled here have come from all across our fair continent—indeed, from continents all across the planet—to present their findings to one another in a civilied and scientific manner, and I do not wish for them to be harassed or interrupted in any way.”

  Ray gave a tug at my arm. “He has them quiet. Good time to go,” he said.

  “Just when the party’s finally getting interesting?” I said, laughing nervously. “Golly gosh, Ray, it looks like Brother Sherbrooke’s worked hard for this moment. The least we can do is give him the courtesy of watching.”

  Ray turned his quick gaze from the crowd to me.

  “This is theater,” I said. “Look at Sherbrooke—he’s all but laying Shakespeare on them. And that preacher, who wrote his lines? Come on, I’ll bet they met at a bar in Cincinnati and cooked this up for the publicity it would generate for both sides.”

  Ray squinted at me in disgust.

  “Well, look, Ray, I mean really look at them. They each need the other or there’s nothing to be dramatic about. Poor stiffs like you and me, we’re here to do our jobs—you know, try to figure out whether birds are really descended from dinosaurs, or find out who killed George Dishey. Those boys have a much more complicated agenda.”

  Ray summarily put a hand against my back and shoved me through the door and out through the kitchens beyond, flashing his badge at each surprised face. Outside the service entrance, I caught sight of the man with the Australian hat. He was just pulling open the sliding side door of a van that was parked about fifty feet away, almost out of sight behind a big disposal bin. It struck me as odd that he would park there instead of in the main parking lot with the rest of the conferees, so I watched the man over my shoulder as Ray steered me forward. As the sliding door reached its fully open position, enough light filled the van that I could see that there was another man sitting in the backseat. He had a dilapidated appearance, all faded plaid flannel and patched jeans. His fingers were thickened from hard labor and his wrists thin and sinewed. Most spectacularly, he wore his beard almost a foot long, in a curtain of pale brown whiskers that fell straight from beneath his jutting cheekbones, hiding his mouth. As his head swung my way, his eyes opened wide in surprise, narrowed, locked on mine, and then seemed to catch fire as a smile slowly split his beard from his drooping, feathery mustache.

  My mouth fell open. It was the helicopter pilot from the photograph in George’s living room. I’d have known him anywhere. Not just because of his startling looks—now half-covered by the whiskers, a beard as long and straight as the one on the man who had shadowed me—but because of the light that seemed to burn from his eyes. Through those glowing eyes, he shot a toxic slug of emotions to me, an invitation mixed with seductive menace. I felt pierced, like a hot dagger had just been shoved through my heart. It was a helpless feeling, as if he knew something I didn’t and the only way I could be free of him was to kneel down and let him flow through me. “Ray!” I gasped.

  Ray pulled me even harder, mercifully snapping my attention from the man in the van to himself. I swung my head to look into his eyes. He was concentrating, a look of irritation clamped on his face. I could tell he wasn’t listening, that he wouldn’t listen, that he was sick of my interference, that—

  “That’s the man!” I whispered. I glanced back again. The door to the van was rolling shut.

  “What man?” he muttered, still pulling me toward the main parking lot.

  “Ray, listen!” I said, louder now. “There’s a man there in that van! I saw him in a picture in George’s house! And he looks like the guy who shot at us!”

  Ray stopped and swung his attention to the van, but it was already rolling, disappearing down the service lane around the back of the building.

  “He’s getting away!” I said stupidly, stating the obvious.

  Ray dropped my arm and yanked a small spiral-bound notebook and a pen out of his breast pocket and began to write.

  “Ray!”

  “I got the plate number. I’ll call it in.”

  “He was with a commercial collector,” I gasped, uncertain what that meant.

  Now Ray grabbed my arm again and kept me moving until we had rounded the building and fetched up next to his prowl car, where he flashed his badge one more time to get the buses moving out of his way. His face was set in blank concentration, and he was no longer looking at me. As he opened the door on my side of the car with one hand, I saw the other begin to rise, as if he was going to apply pressure to the top of my head to push me into the car, a move I’d seen police use with drunks in downtown Denver.

  “I’ll give!” I said. “I’ll come along quietly.”

  And I did give. As I sank into the seat, something inside of me began to collapse. Ray closed my door and hurried around to the other side, got in, picked up his radio microphone, and called in the number of the van’s license plate. “Detain occupants for questioning,” he said, and gave the case number. Then he replaced the microphone in its cradle and leaned toward me, his near arm curled protectively around my headrest. He waited for me to speak.

  I let out a shaky sigh. “Okay, I’m scared. What am I supposed to do? This guy who looks like the guy who shot at us last night—it isn’t him, but it could be his brother—was right here at this conference, and if his brother doesn’t mind shooting at us, maybe he doesn’t, either. I could have been killed, damn it! And all my gear is back at that motel. How am I supposed to walk in there and get my stuff, knowing that whoever fired that rifle last night is probably watching again? And how the hell did they know where to find me?”

  Ray raised his free hand to scratch his forehead. “Um, Bert already had your bags picked up. An officer turned your car in for you. You don’t have to go back there.”

  I flopped my hands about in exasperation. “Great. So what am I supposed to do for transportation?”

  Ray straightened up, buckled his seat belt, and said, “I told them you could ride with me.”

  I KEPT MY eyes closed all the way down Little Cottonwood Canyon to the wide turn where the road swung out of the sharp fault-carved face of the Wasatch Range. I didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to open my eyes and look at Ray and wonder what in hell I was doing riding around in somebody else’s puzzle. I wanted to say, Let me go home. Leave me alone. Let me sleep. I know nothing.

  But I knew that the time for leaving had been long before I arrived. I was stuck, I was implicated, I had no alibi, and God only knew what had really happened. If I had been in Ray’s shoes and had found a corpse at 9:30 A.M. and had seen some woman breaking into the dead man’s house at 10:30—a woman who just happened to have arrived the night before, no less—I’d be watching her myself. The police could not let me leave just yet, and even if they did, there was now this little matter of my personal safety. I had made the mistake of thinking that both men involved in the break-in and shadowing the night before had been clumsy, but clearly the man inside had been much smarter, had had a vehicle hidden nearby, had managed to follow us to the motel without attracting Ray’s notice. And if he had managed to track me that far, then he could just as easily track me home to Colorado, a place where there was no Officer Raymond, no nice guy do-gooder with an inexplicable urge toward keeping my skin intact. So I had to face facts: It was in my best interest to stay, help Ray crack the case as quickly as possible, get the trigger-happy nutcase who had shot at us behind bars, and then go home and sleep.

  When I finally opened my eyes, I rocked my head back and forth to pop a couple of kinks out of my neck and sighed. Ray glanced at me out of the corners of his eyes as he negotiated another t
urn. I took time to examine him at leisure, taking in the muscular forearm that extended to the steering wheel, the firm abdomen, the astonishingly perfect profile with its full lips and strong brow. He sat in the relaxed but alert posture that only people with fine muscle tone can approach. For the fifth or sixth time, I decided that he was not real, that I was dreaming, and that I might soon awake.

  Feeling my eyes on him, he glanced at me again, then fixed his gaze rigidly on the road. I smiled wistfully, thinking, If I have to wake up in someone else’s nightmare, it might as well have its attendant daydreams.

  As if reading my thoughts, Ray stiffened ever so slightly. His free hand rose to his face and made a self-conscious exploration of his nose.

  I looked away. “You come across that van on the way down the canyon?”

  “No.”

  “And no one else has seen it, either,” I said, knowing I would have heard it on the radio, which had been burbling away with its flow of police business.

  “No.”

  “What’s up-canyon from Snowbird?”

  “Not much.”

  I let my line of questioning drop. Ray was the homeboy, the one who knew all the local routes like the back of his hand. He had certainly followed me through the streets of Salt Lake City without being noticed, so he’d know every route in and out of Little Cottonwood Canyon. And I didn’t ever want to see the man in that van again. Instead, I asked quietly, “Where are we headed?”

  “Police headquarters.”

  “Hmpf. Is that an invitation or a requirement?”

  Ray’s near shoulder rose a fraction of an inch, as if warding me off.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m feeling pretty … well, you name it. This situation is … All right I’m defensive as hell, and I wish for your sake you weren’t stuck baby-sitting me, and I wish like anything that right now I was knee-deep in a trout stream in the high Rockies instead of eyebrow-deep in this mess. No offense, you’ve been great, but …”

  Ray nodded but kept his eyes on the road.

  DETECTIVE BERT LOOKED up as we walked into his office. His insane grin slopped from one side of his face to the other in greeting. “Ah, the little lovebirds,” he gushed. “Been out gathering twigs for your nest?”

  I stopped short, my stomach tightening. Pressuring me was one thing, but this was harassment of a different kind. Bert was accusing a married man of … well, taking an interest in another woman, and that was … well, it was sexual harassment, wasn’t it? Just because it was between two men didn’t make it something else. Or did it? Did men harass each other in the workplace in the same obscene ways they harassed women? I looked toward Ray for some clue as to what Bert’s jab was all about.

  Ray had stopped, too, and had snapped to like a soldier standing at attention, hands tucked behind his back. “Reporting,” he said tersely. I was just far enough behind him that I could see that his hands had tightened into fists.

  Bert lurched up from his desk. “Re-por-ting,” he sang. “How charming. Here, let’s get the little lady a chair.” He whipped his side chair around for me to sit on. He made a burlesque of brushing it off, even opened his palm toward it in offering.

  I remained standing.

  “You don’t want it?” he asked mockingly, eyes popping. “My, my, my, my. I thought anyone who could rivet Officer Thomas Brigham Raymond, Junior’s attentions must deserve a chair. Oh, ho, ho, ho …” He yanked his own chair into a better position for a casual interrogation, dumped his behind into it, and leaned back. The springs in the seat squealed sickeningly under the strain. He shifted his butt this way and that, searching out what appeared to be just the perfect angle, then hoisted his long legs up onto his desk and stared at Ray blankly. “I’m going to have your ass,” he informed him bluntly.

  Ray did not flinch.

  I blinked. The “Junior” explained why he was nicknamed off his last name rather than his first, but Thomas Brigham Raymond? I reeled at the recognition that I might have been traveling with a local blue blood, one of the legion of great-grandsons of Brigham Young, the Mormon leader who had brought the faithful to Utah, among them his fifty-three wives. I swung my attention quickly back to Bert. Was he not a Mormon, and therefore bitter about the limitations on his career an outsider could find within a sectarian society?

  “I’m going to have your ass,” Bert repeated, “for personal involvement with a suspect. I’m going to have your ass filleted. I’m going to have your ass marinated. I’m going to have your ass—”

  “What do you mean, ‘personal involvement’?” I butted in. “And are you calling me a suspect? You say that to my face!”

  Bert grinned his ghoulish grin at me. “I just did,” he said. I had succeeded only in shifting his wild eyes from Ray to myself, and I immediately felt so chilled that I wasn’t certain I owed Ray that much, even if he had saved my life.

  Ray continued to stand at attention.

  “You were talking about me, right?” I said idiotically.

  “Was I?” Bert cooed.

  I gave him a look like stink. “You got a question for me, or can I leave?” I said disgustedly.

  “Do I?”

  “Oh, cut it out,” I said. “Are you running a murder investigation here, or are you just in the business of making people uncomfortable? I am too tired and too sure of my rights and too fed up from too long a history of being hazed by men on the job site to take any more of your crap.”

  Ray shifted slightly. His lips took on a tinge of a smile.

  Detective Bert stuck out his lower lip in a parody of petulance. “Well, I—”

  “That was a rhetorical question,” I snapped. “Officer Raymond here has been doing a nice job of keeping me alive. I appreciate that in a policeman. And I mean, really, if you haven’t anything more for us than a few more degrees of heat, then let me make you a present of what I learned this morning at the convention so I can get on with my life.” I wanted to add, Because you’re so full of shit that if I gave you a big-enough dose of Ex-Lax and waited five minutes, I could fit you in a shoe box, but I thought better of it.

  Bert’s smile sweetened. He sat up straight, pulled up to his desk, and picked up a pencil. “It’s your party, Sherlock.”

  I shook the stiffness out of my shoulders. Cleared my throat. “George Dishey was not well respected by his colleagues. He apparently cut corners and practiced what’s considered questionable science. This would rile a lot of people who feel compelled to do it by the book. Anyway, he had to be making some sort of living—but how? He had no connection with the university here or with any other respected scientific institution. He reputedly liked to work alone, which is unusual, because big-bone guys often have to heft considerable tonnage.” “Do what?” Bert asked. He was scribbling studiously and did not look up. For the first time, he had forgotten to be obnoxious to me, and I felt almost comfortable with him. I watched him write. The shallow muscles about his forehead worked as he concentrated. With his guard down, I could momentarily see past the bluster into a lonely, intelligent man who probably found no place of repose except his work.

  I looked away, unprepared to feel sympathy. “The fossils they work with weigh a huge amount. If you’re lucky enough to find the skull of a big carnivorous dinosaur, for instance, or, say, the pelvis of a big leaf-eater, you’re talking about several cubic feet to a cubic yard or more of solid rock, because you leave the bones in the surrounding matrix—that’s the sediment that filled in around the dead animal’s bones and lithified … ah, turned to rock—when they pull the fossil out of the outcrop. The bones are usually shattered into pieces and quite fragile, and by leaving them in the matrix, they protect them as far as possible. They cut away as much extraneous rock as possible, and protect exposed surfaces of bones by wrapping them in burlap soaked in plaster. Then they hack out as much underlying rock as possible, leaving just a few pillars. Then they come in with a crane and break it loose and hoist it onto a flatbed truck. Sometimes, like if the site is really re
mote or halfway up a cliff, they bust the budget and hire a helicopter—you know, a Huey—to come with a sling. The point is, it’s not a one-person job.”

  Bert looked up. “How do you know all this?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “I read. Like Dave Gillette’s book on Seismosaurus. Great descriptions of the art of fossil hunting. And I watch TV. PBS, the Discovery Channel, that kind of stuff. I’m a scientist, remember. Watching someone else do the work is how I relax.”

  Bert’s shoulders lurched with a silent chuckle, and he chanced an unarmored look my way. “Okay, so your guy maybe hired some day labor when he had something heavy.”

  “Well, fine, except that usually you’re out there with a team of grad students and informed citizens chipping away at the rock like rats at a wheel of cheese, because even a well-funded dig can’t afford to pay for labor. And what’s stranger yet is that he could even afford to dig himself. You’re out there digging instead of working at some other job, for starters, and then there’s all the equipment, and food and lodging—okay, some kind of tent—and flatbeds and Hueys don’t come cheap. George Dishey couldn’t afford to be a dilettante. He had at least one extra mouth to support, maybe more—did you find Nina?—and a house—did he own it?—and his colleagues didn’t like his methods. A mite tough to get an NSF grant when you’re considered a sloppy dude. So where’s he getting his money?”

  “NSF?”

  “National Science Foundation.”

  Bert scribbled another note. “Anything else?”

  “No. Or yeah. Dishey roomed with Dan Sherbrooke at Yale. Sherbrooke’s the conference chair, and my registration packet says he’s with the university here in Salt Lake. So Sherbrooke would be in a position to help Dishey, but if I read between the lines correctly, there was no love lost between the two of them. And Dishey was in the habit of letting on to people that he was with the university, which he was not.”