Bone Hunter

by Sarah Andrews

  Allison said, “So I been feeling kinda tired ever since. Artemis here did a bioenergy scan on me and found out I kinda sucked their auras up or something.”

  “She felt sorry for them,” the driver explained.

  “So she’s clearing them out of me and sending them on their ways. So they got stuck in the mud, but what killed them, Artemis?”

  The bus driver squealed, “Ooo! Earthquake!”

  “Oh, you mean the mud went thixotropic?”

  Artemis’s eyes opened and closed again. “They don’t know that word.”

  Allison said, “It turned to soup. Sucked ’em down. They’re drowning.”

  The driver nodded. “Some of the females are pregnant.”

  This was too much for me. “They were egg layers!” I argued.

  The driver smiled sweetly. “Carrying fertilized eggs, same thing,” she said patiently. “Mmm, the energy of the carnivores feels different from the little leaf-eater.”

  “Camarasaurs weren’t so little,” I prattled on. “They were as long as a football field and probably weighed twenty tons.”

  “You wouldn’t know it from its aura,” Artemis replied serenely.

  I rocked my head back and stared up into the sky, wondering what parallel universe I had just fallen into. First Mormons with loaded decks and now New Age bus drivers with midget dinosaur auras. I watched darkening clouds drift across the infinite heavens and admitted, deep down inside and only to myself, that I was scared.

  TOWARD LATE AFTERNOON, the FBI agent slipped away down the street to acquire a car, and the party at the Mecca Club began to cycle their beer-distended bladders through the rest rooms preparatory to loading onto the buses and heading back to Snowbird. My stomach churned with hunger and the urgency of my plan. I needed salt and water against dehydration and food energy for desert travel. I headed into the café and ordered a hamburger and a packet of potato chips, the perfect foods, swilled some black coffee, and settled in to wait.

  There was a small commotion as Lew and Vance all but dragged Dan Sherbrooke in from the bar and poured him into a booth. A waitress hustled over to them with a pot of coffee and they began to pour it into him cup by cup. Just as the FBI agent reappeared through the front door of the café, Dan bawled dramatically, “Thank you, Lew. You’re always there for me. My friend.”

  “Some friend,” Vance seethed, his own liquor loosening his tongue. “You knew that site had been hit, and did you tell us? No!”

  “What are you talking about?” Lew whined.

  “I saw your boot prints on top of the backhoe tracks when I first got to the site. Maybe you even drove that backhoe in there yourselfl”

  Lew lunged toward the wiry little man and yanked him up by his shirtfront.

  Vance dangled from Lew’s fists, screaming, “Go ahead and hit me, you thieving shit!”

  Lew dropped Vance and staggered backward until he fetched up against the counter. “Okay, so maybe I was there before the field trip. But I didn’t trash it! It was already like that when I got there.”

  Dan had turned and begun to rise from his seat, swaying. “Lew? Lew, you knew?”

  Lew jammed his hands into his pockets and shrugged, a boy caught playing with matches. “Yeah. Okay, so I was coming back from fishing on Sunday and thought I’d check on the site. But fossils was already gone!”

  “Just thought you’d take a look,” Vance sassed. “Just happened to drive by!”

  Lew pursed his lips and made his appeal to Dan. “I come out here for years with you, and what do I get? You finally find something good and take this little shit down there to lift it instead of me! I wanted to see it was all. So yeah, I was here, but it was already gone! Just tracks, like today!” He flailed his arms wildly, trying too late to express nonexistent horror and loss. “What was I supposed to do?”

  I turned and glanced at the FBI agent to make sure he was getting all of this. He was.

  “What were you supposed to do?” Dan drawled, lumbering to his feet. “I’ll tell you what you were supposed to do. You were supposed to tell me, for starts! I would have canceled the trip!” He leaned forward and bellowed, “What were you dreaming of, letting me come ahead on down here? You sniveling bottom-feeder! You whore’s offal!” With sudden ferocity, Dan swung a huge pudgy fist into Lew’s jaw.

  Lew staggered and fell. His head hit the floor like a ripe melon. He lay still a moment, stunned, then drew his hands over his face and howled, “It was George ’at stole the thing, Dan! You know that! George did it!”

  “Do you think me cretinous?” Dan bellowed. “George had not clue one where that site was!”

  “Did too!” Lew squealed from the floor. A practiced sniveler, he knew better than to rise while his opponent was still riled. “His stoolie told him! That beard-o freak with the rifle!”

  Everyone looked at Dan expectantly. He looked back at each of us, his eyes alert with something he was not saying.

  The FBI agent moved swiftly into position, deftly placing his hands under the fallen man’s shoulders, as if Lew’s safety and comfort were all he cared about. “This sounds important, gentlemen,” he said, mollifying all parties present in the time-honored way a sober man handles drunks. “Tell us about this, Lew. Tell us about George’s stoolie.”

  Lew said, “Aw shit, George always had his little informants. Losers. Geeks. These ones were no different. Shit, Dan, it was that beardo guy led you to this Allosaurus site in the first place. You remember him!”

  Dan popped his eyes in assumed outrage.

  Vance stared at his professor in shock. “But you told me you found that site!”

  “Well, I …”

  Lew sat up, wobbled, and touched a hand gingerly to his lip, which was beginning to bleed. “Since when does Dan move an inch when he can con someone else into walking a mile for him? Your hero here paid him in food, Vance. Beardo led him to that site and Dan paid him in food.” He laughed, a high, tittering schoolgirl giggle, and winced when it made his lip hurt.

  I said, “Canned food?”

  Lew looked at me, his mouth sagging in hurt surprise that I had information he hadn’t given me yet. “Yeah. Number-ten cans of dried fruit, egg mix. Beef jerky. Those bones were worth hundreds of thousands—millions!—and he pays them in dried fruit! I couldn’t believe it. Best deal since Sir Francis Drake bought New York from the Indians for twenty-two bucks.”

  “That was Peter Minuit and Manhattan Island,” Sherbrooke corrected haughtily. “And it was trinkets, not cash. Twenty-four dollars’ worth.”

  Not Tom and I exchanged looks. The glint in his eyes seemed to say, Questioning drunks is fun, huh?

  I said, “So Dan, you bought the canned food from George. Did he maybe introduce you to this finder, too?” About then, nothing that had ever occurred between George Dishey and Dan Sherbrooke would have surprised me.

  Dan said nothing.

  Lew said, “I saw them sitting with George right here in this café!”

  “Never!” Dan protested.

  Vance screwed up his face and said, “George was here?”

  Lew looked from face to face, recovering his sense of self-importance swiftly. “Sure.” He looked both ways, artlessly covering his complicity. “He said he was just driving through, but I knew better. The waitress here knew him by name.”

  Dan’s face reddened. To Lew he roared, “You told me you’d just stumbled across this guy in the café. And all the time, you were in bed with George?”

  Lew stuck out his lower lip petulantly.

  “Which waitress was here?” I asked.

  “That one,” Lew answered.

  The FBI agent turned toward the woman behind the counter, who had lit a cigarette, the better to enjoy the show. “Yeah, that was me,” she said. “But they wasn’t all together. That TV guy with the bushy beard was here with this guy and that other with the long beard first.” She pointed at Lew with her cigarette. “Then George goes out the back door and this one comes in the front.” S
he pointed at Dan.

  So George had engineered the whole thing. What better way to know what Dan was up to than to set up his digs?

  Dan stared at Lew, his mouth agape. Lew shrugged.

  “What did the other two man look like?” asked the agent.

  She flicked at the cigarette and said, “Oh, he was a skinny fellow with a long beard like Moses. Kinda creepy. Didn’t want no coffee or beer—that type. He set down there by the back booth, real nervous like, with George. Didn’t seem to like it when he kept him waiting there. But I liked that George. He always tipped good.” She sniffed at Dan, as if to say, Unlike you, fella.

  The agent stepped toward the counter. I had to move quickly to get a look at the picture he slipped out of his breast pocket to show to the waitress. It was an enlargement of the helicopter pilot from the picture in George’s study, computer-enhanced to show the man aged and bearded. I was amazed by how much it looked like the man I had glimpsed in the van.

  “Yep. That’s the one,” said the waitress.

  I grabbed the picture from the FBI agent as he attempted to palm it back into his shirt pocket and maintain his cover as Tom Latimer the dinosaur illustrator. I stuffed the picture under Dan Sherbrooke’s nose. “Know him?” I asked furiously. “Ever maybe tell him where I was staying?”

  Dan looked stupidly at the picture. “No.”

  “Then who did you tell, Dan?”

  “Tell what?”

  “Where I was staying. What motel. The police told you Monday morning, and unless you hit my room yourself, you sent someone else in your place. Now, who was it?” I demanded.

  “What are you—” Sherbrooke stopped in midsentence. “Oh. Oh, I see what you’re saying. Yes, the police mentioned that to me, but it only stayed in my mind because I couldn’t for the life of me understand why he thought I’d want to know. And yes, come to think of it, I did pass the information along.”

  I stared at him, appalled. He was either a fantastic actor or had no idea that I’d been shot at and that, therefore, giving out my room location might endanger me. “Who’d you tell?” I asked doggedly.

  Dan said, “What’s-his-name Smeely, the commercial guy. Did he find you?”

  Disgusted, I thrust the picture back toward the FBI agent. As he retrieved it, he asked the waitress, “You ever see them in here at any other time?”

  She shook her head. “Nope.”

  The questioning was interrupted as Artemis, the bus driver, stuck her head in the door from the sidewalk. “You guys ready?” she asked. “Everybody else is on board.”

  Vance staggered to his feet, took Dan’s arm, and began to lead him toward the door. Dan draped his long, rubbery arm around the slighter man and blubbered, “Oh, Verne. What would I do without you?”

  “Remember my name, for starts,” the young man said bitterly. “Come on, Dan, let’s hit the road.”

  Lew stumbled to his feet and headed after them like a dog who’s used to getting the smallest, driest bone to chew on, hates knowing it, but has no inspiration to find himself another master.

  I looked at the FBI agent, who shook his head. “They have alibis,” he said softly, so that only I could hear him. “Dan and Vance, each other. Lew, his wife.”

  I opened my mouth to say something but couldn’t think what to say. I had asked them every question I could think of but still couldn’t blame them—at least not directly—for George’s death. Yet somehow I felt that they deserved at least part of the blame. They had been half the war of vanities that had put George at risk; I was sure of that. Yet what, precisely, was the connection between bone theft and murder? Had George threatened to expose the complicity of one or more players? Or had the pissing match between George and Dan simply fomented to the point where somebody, somehow, had to get hurt? And had George meant for Dan’s Allosaurus to be stolen?

  There was another piece to the puzzle that still lay hidden; I could feel it. Something twisted. Something strange about the relationship between George and Nina, and all the other women, including myself, that he had used or misused. Something sad and somehow poignant, because he had been kind to Nina, after all, and not taken advantage of her slight little body for anything but finding fossils.

  The shuffling trio were halfway out the door when I suddenly thought to ask, “Hey, Dan! Do you know Heddie?”

  Dan turned. “Heddie …”

  “A friend of George’s?”

  “You mean Pat Hedlund?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “Was she his wife?”

  Dan looked confused. “He,” he answered. “He was some high school friend; used to come up to Yale to visit him. The two of them were very close … . ‘Heddie’ was George’s pet name for him … wouldn’t let anyone else call him that … wouldn’t let anyone else near him, for that matter.” He shrugged his rounded shoulders.

  My brain made a sort of pinging noise. George, you clever old liar, you. You had a wry sense of humor under all that deceit.

  “You know where Heddie’s living?” asked Not Tom Latimer conversationally.

  Dan let out a muted belch and adjusted his mangled glasses. “He was killed in Vietnam. George never really got over it. Took two years off between undergrad and his doctorate and let the draft get him. Said he had to go ‘kill a gook for Heddie.’ Set him back behind the rest of us professionally, right from the start.” Dan shook his head judgmentally. “The graduate schools didn’t take him as seriously when he didn’t apply right out of his undergraduate program. Put him too far back in the line when the funding was being handed out. Why?”

  21

  NOT TOM LATIMER DROVE ME EAST OF PRICE TO THE AIRPORT under darkening skies. The thunderheads that had played above the western cliffs through the past hours had spread north and eastward, licking cold fingers out over Price and engulfing the canyon that led back to Salt Lake City.

  “You’ll be in a Bell Jet Ranger,” he told me. “They won’t take off from Salt Lake until they know they can get straight through this squall line, so it may be awhile. Fully fueled, they have a cruising range of only two hours, with a safety margin of twenty minutes. Once they get here, they’ll refuel. You’ll be able to get down to that site again easy, get your evidence, and, daylight permitting, maybe scout the immediate neighborhood. What did you say Dishey’s site should look like?”

  “Nina said it was up close to some cliffs, kind of a lean-to thing. I imagine it was camouflaged, and the Swell is a big area. And that’s all assuming I’m right. Maybe she isn’t even from these parts.”

  “And maybe they won’t get through from Salt Lake. And even then you might not be able to proceed. I don’t like the way those anvil clouds are leaning out over the desert.”

  I looked balefully out across the bluffs that led away toward the open lands, no longer certain whether my plan made sense.

  The FBI agent handed me some folded paper. “Look, I rounded up the BLM maps for the area and this other one, which shows a kind of shaded relief of the mesas and canyons out there. And here’s a USGS two-degree sheet. Take a look at them. Memorize them.”

  “I’ve got a geological map here,” I said. I unfolded it.

  “Is that the one Vance was showing this morning?” he asked, giving me a look that said, You little scamp.

  “I borrowed it from Vance. Took me a while to peel it off that board. He won’t be missing it for a day or two, not until the headache he’s going to wake up with clears away. See? It shows the different geological formations—different colors for each one—where they outcrop at the surface. This purple one is the Morrison Formation.” I traced the band where it curved along the western ramp of the San Rafael Swell.

  The FBI agent glanced at the map and then back at his driving.

  I said, “The color band gets real wide here and here because the formation is lying almost flat and the rise of the land is gradual, so the surface exposure is like a shallow slice through it, opening it across a wide area.” I made a shallow slic
ing motion with one hand. “Like if you’re looking down on top of a three-layer cake and you chop it vertically, you hardly see any of the middle layer, but if you slash it at a shallow angle, it shows up several inches wide.”

  “I get it. Neat.”

  “How long a flight is it from Salt Lake?”

  The agent looked up at the sky. “An hour or so. It’s a fast ship.”

  “Ship?”

  “I rode a lot of choppers in Nam. I don’t envy you this ride.”

  “No?” I grinned. I had recently won my wings, finally, after running out of funds repeatedly while completing the flight hours necessary for my pilot’s license. But that was for fixed-wing craft. A helicopter was a rotorcraft, a bird that could fly straight up. I was thrilled that Ray was bringing a bird, even if it meant that my dear pal Detective Bert was also coming along. Leave it to Ray to do it by the book and tell his superiors my entire analysis and plan.

  Not Tom Latimer’s smile faded. “No. I’ve been in a crash. Not fun.”

  “Were you hurt?” I asked gingerly. I didn’t like to think about the downside of flying.

  “Just a compressed disk or two.” He shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

  “What happened?”

  “We hit some wires. They’ll flip you right onto your nose. It’s ugly. Even if you pancake straight down, the rotors bend, you know, and hit the ground a split second after the craft does, and they shear off and take off like a knife-thrower’s in town, take out the tail boom and so forth. The skids crumple and the cockpit cracks like an egg, but that engine’s still moving. You don’t go straight down unless you’re in a stationary hover, which pilots hate to do unless they’re quite a ways up, because you need either airspeed or altitude to effect an autorotation to cushion a dead landing.”

  “You know a lot about this for someone who doesn’t like flying.”

  He smiled. “Amazing what you learn when the pilot’s in the next bed in the hospital.

  “So you’re moving forward when you start to go down, maybe sliding through the air at an angle, say, of forty-five degrees.” He held a hand over his head, then brought it slap down toward his knees. “Think on it, the heaviest block in the whole ship’s up over your head—the turbines—and it’s spinning and still has momentum, so it yanks the roof forward. The wall behind the pilot’s seat folds up on him and squeezes the air out of him. You die of asphyxiation if the impact doesn’t get you first.”