Bone Deep

by Randy Wayne White

  I felt a sickening tightness in my stomach. Seconds later, though, she returned to the door and said through the screen, “I’m sorry I lost my temper. I don’t make friends easily, Marion. I’m not quick to give them up either.”

  I was smiling again. “Come inside and finish your coffee.”

  Hannah moved her head side to side slowly, a thoughtful but determined No. “Tonight maybe, but I want to think things through. And I’m not coming back here alone—I’m serious about that.”

  “Would it be better if I asked Tomlinson to stop by?”

  Hannah muttered something, then said, “If it’s okay, I’ll bring Rhonda and Joann. I’d like to look at the stars through that night scope thing. My friend Birdy Tupplemeyer also. She called and wants to do something tonight—but you don’t have to worry about her.”

  “I’m not a drug smuggler,” I said again.

  Hannah, her eyes soft, looking into mine, let that go unchallenged. “I don’t want us mad at each other, Doc. But it can’t be the way it was.”

  When we were alone, she seldom called me Doc, but that was okay. I had kept the best megalodon teeth I’d found with Owen, plus a few other good pieces that I could show her friends.

  “I’ll make mojitos and lay out some fossils, too,” I said.

  Birdy Tupplemeyer, a high-octane redhead, was a cop, worked for the sheriff’s department, but I wasn’t going to blow it by questioning Hannah’s judgment.

  • • •

  SHORTLY AFTER HANNAH LEFT, the man from Venice Masonic lodge called. “I’m at the marina, but your friends aren’t here. Heard from them yet?”

  “No,” I told him. “What about the motorcycles?”

  “There were only two, not three, so maybe one left before I got here. The dockmaster saw your friends get in a car and follow both motorcycles out of the parking lot. A fellow who does shark tooth tours was in the backseat, a local named Mick. You said they were driving a white Chrysler?”

  “A rental car. I don’t like the idea of them following motorcycles. Maybe I should call the police.”

  The man, distracted for a moment, spoke to himself, saying, Is that smoke . . . ? He sniffed the air, then got back to me. “Don’t worry about the fellas on the motorcycles, they’re both members of our lodge.”

  “You smell something burning?”

  “Someone getting their charcoal going, probably. We’ve had a lot of rain.”

  I asked, “How do you know the two bikers belong to your lodge?”

  “Because the dockmaster is a member, too. He’s trying to get one of them on the phone right now, but motorcycles are loud. It might be a while. In the meantime, I can keep looking if you want. Up to you.” The man hesitated. “How serious is this?”

  I was unconvinced that membership in a fraternity guaranteed that one of the bikers wasn’t the crazed Harley gangbanger. I said, “I’ve met the guide, Mick. Do you know him?”

  “Only by reputation,” he replied. “So I guess I just answered my own question. Yeah, I should keep looking and . . .” Another distracted pause before he said, “Hmm, okay . . . I know where it’s coming from now.”

  “What?”

  “Last night, a house on Caspersen Beach caught fire. This wind must have stirred the smoke up.”

  Phone to my ear, I walked toward the lab, then returned to the window, saying, “My friends might have gone to Caspersen Beach with Mick. Was it the house owned by Finn Tovar? Tovar was a—”

  “I know what Finn Tovar was. No, the owner was a widow, used to own a jewelry store here. She died in the fire.”

  “A woman?” I said. “Was it arson? Do you know her name?”

  The man became guarded. “Why are you so interested in Finn Tovar? No . . . don’t bother. I’ll have one of the brothers ask your friends. They’re obligated to tell the truth. I’ve heard some things—about the fire—but what I heard isn’t official, so I can’t give out any names. But how does a house fire concern you?”

  Venice Masonic lodge also had members who were firefighters, I guessed. I was explaining that Tomlinson was searching for three women he had met on the beach when the man got another call. “Have to take this,” he said. “Your friends will be in touch soon.” He hung up.

  I had failed to ask the man’s name, I realized, and my phone was beeping. Tomlinson—just as the man had predicted.

  I answered, saying, “Where are you? Get in the damn car and drive straight to Dinkin’s Bay.”

  Tomlinson, however, was in the middle of a meltdown. “Doc, it happened, man. There’s blood on my hands again. I led the devil to Lillian, that sweet lady’s house, and he—”

  I said, “I was afraid it was her. I just heard about the fire.”

  “From who? Lillian’s house, I’m standing at the edge of the drive. You can’t even tell except for a window upstairs where the siding is scorched. What I can’t help picturing is—”

  I told him, “Get in the car. Once you’re on the interstate, we’ll talk.” Tomlinson had to snap out of it. There was a chance the man who had threatened him was somewhere nearby, watching. If he was also the arsonist, he was a killer.

  My pal couldn’t stop. “Poor little Lillian. I’ll have that freak’s head for this, Doc, I mean it. I can’t help picturing how scared she would’ve been, a rag jammed in her mouth. The way her eyes must have looked when he—”

  “Stop it,” I said. “You don’t know that’s what happened. Put Dunk on the phone and go start the car—lock the doors, too.” When he protested, I said, “You’re putting the other women in danger just by being there. Is that what you want?”

  Tomlinson said, “No . . . but give me a few minutes. I’ll have Dunk call you back.”

  • • •

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Fallsdown, unperturbed, told me, “I can’t talk any sense into him. Our friends here say the fire was—well, I can’t tell you what they said. But there’s no proof the woman was murdered. Now Tomlinson’s looking for the other two women—and the guy who did it. He’s as mad as I’ve ever seen him.”

  I asked, “Is Mick with you? What about the guys on motorcycles?”

  “Give me a sec.” I imagined Fallsdown putting some distance between himself and the others before he resumed. “Mick said for three hundred bucks he’ll set me up with the biggest relics collector in the state. Same person Finn Tovar had a feud going with. He wants me to meet him tomorrow at a spot this guy is supposedly working. Just me.”

  “Setting you up might be exactly what he’s doing,” I said.

  “Our friends don’t trust Mick either and they know him. I’m going anyway.”

  “Offer him six hundred,” I said, “but I want to come. If Mick balks, offer him more—but not much more. That would make him suspicious. Don’t worry about the money. I’ll cover it.”

  “Up until now,” said the man from Montana, “I thought you were the rational type. Next, you’ll be volunteering to go on spirit quests.”

  “Where are you supposed to meet Mick and this blood feud guy?”

  Fallsdown had been given only the route numbers of an intersection, inland Florida, between Bradenton and Sebring, an isolated area. When he finished, I said, “With your sense of direction, you’ll be in Georgia by nightfall. You need me.”

  Fallsdown responded with a pretty good Tonto riff: “White brother have something up sleeve. Or maybe he catch fever from sacred fossils.”

  Good. I hoped he believed that.

  “Finding those shark teeth was like finding King Tut’s tomb,” I agreed. “I know the area you’re talking about.”

  Yesterday, in Owen’s Jeep, I had crossed the same intersection. It was only a mile or two from a sandy ski slope and the quarries owned by a defunct company, Mammoth Ridge Mines.

  Fallsdown said, “Mick told me to bring a mask and fins because we’re gonna
stop at some river. At first, I didn’t know what he was talking about.”

  “He expects you to dive with Tovar’s old enemy? Or just the two of you?”

  “I’m not sure. Then Mick got around to money. How much would I pay to get the carving back? Either that or, if this big-time collector can produce the carving, I’ll need something extra special to trade. Plains Indian period, he hinted at Hopi ceramics, and mentioned that a Skin—meaning me—could make a lot of money as a supplier.”

  “You have access to burial sites,” I said. “I hope you used it as leverage.”

  “Back when I was drinking, don’t think I wasn’t tempted to get into the business. But piss off the Little People . . . ?” He chuckled, and left it hanging.

  I said, “Let’s play along. I’ve got extra snorkel gear you can use.”

  Fallsdown replied, “At Deer Lodge prison, snorkeling was more of a nighttime elective.”

  He covered the phone and hollered something, then returned. “I better grab Tomlinson—he’s chanting in some weird language and wandering toward the dead woman’s house.”

  FIFTEEN

  That night, after Rhonda, Joann, and Birdy had sated their appetite for fossils, mojitos, and astronomy, I escorted them to the marina, saved my warmest hug for Hannah, then jogged back to the lab. I put the mastodon tusk under a microscope for the first time.

  I was interested—no, eager—because, using only a magnifying glass, I had made a discovery just before the ladies had arrived: Eons ago, a fellow primate had etched his personal nightmare onto the tusk. A Paleo hunter had carved what appeared to be a serpent’s head with fangs . . . something that so scared him, he had put down his club and summoned the first primal stirrings of the artist within.

  In the field sciences, the payoff isn’t money. It’s that exquisite moment of anticipation that separates discovery from revelation. This, potentially, was one of those moments. Across a distance of ten thousand years, a man or woman had sent a message. What was it?

  The tusk was too big to view under a standard lab instrument. Recently, I had bought an inexpensive digital microscope by Celestron. It was handheld, but also had a mounting vise. Plug the scope into a computer, and unwieldy subjects were instantly transformed. The sandpaper skin of a hundred-pound hammerhead became a crystal forest of articulate denticles. Tap a computer key and the image was saved.

  I carried the tusk from its newest hiding place—a cabinet—and placed it on a towel next to the monitor. Got the goosenecked lamp positioned just right and touched a switch . . . fiddled with the microscope’s focus, then switched to low power.

  Stunning—no other way to describe what I saw.

  My god . . .

  Because Tomlinson wasn’t around, I summoned the dog, saying, “You’ve got to see this.”

  The dog opened his eyes long enough to yawn and went back to sleep.

  I was looking at the head of a saber-toothed tiger in profile, not a snake. The cat’s jaws were thrown wide, fangs curved, and long enough to appear venomous. The artist had used flint or shell or a shard of coral—two tools: one pointed to trace the outline, another that was sharp enough to bite into ivory. He had made some false starts at the base of the tusk. The microscope revealed where he had applied too much pressure and his hand had slipped, the gouges tracking always to the right.

  The artist had been left-handed.

  Was that unusual? It would be interesting to discuss with a Paleo sociologist, if such an expert exists. One thing for certain, this was not the work of a beginner. The lines were spare and masculine, one graceful curve adjoined to another, yet they evoked emotion—power, predation, fear.

  The artist, who was a hunter by necessity, was also aware that to this apex predatory, he, on his two slow legs, was easy prey.

  “A saber cat,” I said aloud. Leland Albright had called the animal that when he had compared the value of fossils to gold. And it was Dunk Fallsdown who had told me the value was maximized if the fossil had been worked by Paleo man.

  “This thing’s worth a mint,” I said to the dog, placing the microscope on the desk. “Definitely a petroglyph—a faker would have made it obvious. Archaeologically, this could be priceless. Depends on when it was carved. If it was thirteen thousand years ago, it’s still a great find, but not earthshaking. Fourteen thousand years is the magic number.”

  I looked at the retriever for a moment, then explained: “The Bering Strait was still underwater fourteen thousand years ago. That’s key. It means that Asiatic man first arrived in the Americas by way of Polynesia—Thor Heyerdahl proved it was possible. And there’s an archaeological site near Tallahassee where artifacts already suggest that people arrived on the Florida peninsula before the Bering Strait existed. Or . . . was it fifteen thousand years ago?”

  The dog grunted, meaning he had to use the mangroves or he wanted a quieter spot. I let him out, sniffed the air for rain, then returned to the computer. I saved a dozen images of the petroglyph, then disappeared into an Internet abyss. I read a paper on the Tallahassee dig site, then a newspaper article about a mammal bone that also bore a message from Paleo man.

  By Cara Fitzpatrick

  PALM BEACH POST STAFF WRITER

  VERO BEACH, FL.—For nearly three years, an artifact that might be the oldest piece of artwork in the Americas lay under the sink of an amateur fossil collector’s mobile home.

  It was pure luck that [he] noticed it at all.

  Cleaning his fossils one day last year, the . . . Vero Beach man spotted a small carving on a piece of mammal bone. The image looked like a mastodon, a prehistoric cousin of the elephant.

  If authentic—and a team of scientists at the University of Florida believes it is—the carving would be thousands of years older than Stonehenge in England, the pyramids in Egypt, and Florida’s Everglades . . .

  Already, one anthropologist involved in studying the artifact has dubbed it the “oldest, most spectacular and rare work of art in the Americas.”

  But scientists fear the rare artifact may be lost to public view forever. [The owner] plans to sell it at an auction, much like any private art collector might sell a Picasso . . . The auction, which hasn’t been scheduled, is being advertised online.

  • • •

  THERE WAS A PHOTO of the carving: a mastodon in profile, humpbacked, with short thick tusks. Elegantly simple, the lines spare.

  The same artist? The odds of one frightened, observant person threading a hole twice through a thousand centuries were not good. Still, it was pleasant to muse over the possibility, and it underlined the importance of getting the tusk into the hands of experts.

  And I would.

  I searched for results of the auction. In my mind, there was nothing sinister about the Vero man’s decision to sell—he had health problems, and a Social Security check was his only income. Who could blame him for not donating a godsend?

  Nothing on the Internet, though, about the sale—if there had been a sale.

  I soon found out why. Auctioning Native American relics had been banned by the U.S. in the 1990s. Most European nations had honored the ban.

  France was an exception. Paris became the marketing ally of relic traders worldwide. In 2013, France’s right to sell artifacts, and its refusal to reveal the names of sellers and buyers, was challenged by the Hopi Indian tribe of Arizona. The tribe filed suit against a Paris auction house to stop the sale of seventy ceremonial masks—kachina masks, some two hundred years old, carved from wood and still brightly colored despite their age.

  French courts took the side of French auctioneers. Not only were the masks sold, the Hopi tribe wasn’t even provided with the date and location of the auction.

  France. Maybe the lucky man from Vero had sold the Paleo carving there. One thing I knew for certain: If a stolen tusk bearing only simple thatch designs had been worth a half million, the bone pe
troglyph he’d found was worth two times, ten times, as much. More, possibly. No telling.

  I stood and looked at the length of ivory with new appreciation. As I did, I wondered about the neighbor Owen had mentioned, Monty Mondurant—Vandar, his real first name—the Moroccan. France colonized Morocco. French is the country’s second language. If Mondurant was actually related to Moroccan royalty, he would have powerful friends in Paris. What bothered me was Owen’s eagerness to discredit the man. His comments had had a scapegoat quality, and it all seemed to fit too neatly.

  I did a quick computer search on Mondurant and wasn’t impressed by what I found. He was a publicity hungry ne’er-do-well who had failed at or destroyed everything he touched. According to a recent magazine blurb, he was now living in Spain with an actress “protégée.”

  The rarity of the tusk eclipsed my interest in the Moroccan. Then Toby, the last Albright elephant, came into my head. He and mastodons shared common ancestry, so I compared the two animals. Toby’s tusks were of a similar girth, although longer, and it was possible that, in Toby’s massive brain, genetic memory retained an image that had also survived the Ice Age. Carved somewhere deep within might be the memory of Paleo man as seen through a mastodon’s eyes. The reverse image of what the ancient artist had captured: a strange-looking primate on two frail legs, a spear in his hand.

  If true, the image would trip all the ancient alarms: Danger. Crush or flee.

  Fanciful, but I remembered Toby’s saucer-sized eyes, the sharp look of appraisal as I had approached the fence, the subtle way those eyes had tracked Owen after he opened the gate. The elephant hadn’t survived six decades of captivity by being inattentive.

  I stored the digital microscope in its box and got out my camera bag. Using a full format Canon 5D and a 24mm lens, I took wide-angle shots of the tusk. I switched lenses and attempted a macro close-up of the petroglyph. Sometimes a good lens can see what the human eye cannot.

  But not in this case. The carving of the saber-toothed tiger remained elusive.

  That was significant. Unless Finn Tovar had used a digital microscope, the saber cat might have escaped him, too. Even through a good lab glass, the petroglyph was indistinct, so it was possible he hadn’t noticed.