Bone Hunter (15 page)

Authors: Sarah Andrews

BOOK: Bone Hunter

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“So you’re saying you need the evidence from the rock around the fossil to fully understand it.”

“Yes. How old is it? What else was living at the time? Was it buried in a lake? A river? What kind of river? A perennial stream that flowed through a desert?” Jane’s hands began to move with the pictures that were emerging in her head, her right hand fluttering like wind on the water, her left hand describing the river’s bend. “Did that mean the animals were crowding together at a water hole, fighting for resources? Was the herd on the decline?”

I was ranch born and bred. Herds I understood. Herds crowding together at the watering hole in a semiarid climate, with coyotes on the hunt. That was the life I had lived as a kid in Wyoming. Cows miring in quicksand, falling over into the water, drowning, making a nice feast for the coyotes. “But dinosaurs aren’t cows,” I said, forgetting to fill in the leap that connected my thoughts.

Jane said, “No, they weren’t. The cows came later, much later.”

“I have a hard time imagining them moving in herds.”

“Some species did; you find them in mass burial. Others, no; you only find them alone. Just like us mammals. Or modern birds. Some flocked; some hunted or browsed alone. Some
ate seeds and leaves; others went for meat. Some apparently laid their eggs in rookeries and cared for their young. They were a great bunch of animals.”

“I still have a hard time featuring them. I mean, giant reptiles filling the world?”

Jane led onward to another case, obviously relieved to be back on the subject of something dead a little longer than twenty-four hours. “Like I told you, they weren’t just a bunch of big dumb reptiles. Think of them as more like birds. You compare them to lizards, like their name suggests, and it doesn’t work as well. That was the mistake everybody made the first couple hundred years we looked at these bones: We thought they were lizards. Terrible lizards. Dinosaurs. That’s what the name means. Think of them as lizards and it’s hard to imagine a herd of them gathering by a water hole to drink, but think of them as birds and all of a sudden we can see them moving in flocks, gathering for the protection of numbers, feeding together, nesting together.”

“Like flamingos, or pelicans.”

“Sure. Lovely, elegant things, moving as gracefully as birds. The early paleontologists mounted
T. rex
standing upright, dragging his tail, but they had to break its tail to do that, mount it dislocated—no kidding—and also dislocate its back, and neck. All because they looked at those big bones and thought heavy and thought lizard and assumed it’d have to drag its tail even to walk. But think of their spines as balance beams. Think bird. Think light for their size. The bones weren’t always made of rock.”

“So now they mount them head forward and tail out in back,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Lew. “Or go like Bakker and have them rearing up and dancing.”

“You don’t think they did that?” Jane asked, shooting him an impudent smile.

“What do I know?” Lew joked. “I’m only a tech.”

Jane curled up a delicate hand and gave Lew a playful punch on the shoulder. “Yes, you’re a tech, but you have a feeling for them, Lew. You’re good. You’ve worked with Dan for years. You’ve been in the field with him half a dozen times.”

Lew’s face clouded. “Yeah. I’ve worked out there alongside Dan for years, carrying his damned equipment, busting my back in those pits, getting heatstroke. Vance thinks he’s just invented suffering for science, but I’ve been at it since before he was born.”

I looked at Lew more closely, reappraising him. Had he been jealous of Vance’s closeness with his professor? Had he brought me here so I’d suspect Vance of murder? Or did he feel sorriest for himself, and want to nurse a grudge against Dan?

Lew hung his head. “Then Dishey has to go and make it all a contest. He yanked the damned things out of the ground as fast as he could, just to make his name big, just to make a buck, just to beat Dan.”

I watched the emotions that flickered across Lew’s face. Much as his tone and gestures spoke of an almost morose dedication to Sherbrooke’s interests, the glint in his eyes suggested a crafty consciousness of the theatrical effect he thought he was projecting.

AS I FOLLOWED LEW BACK UP ACROSS THE UNIVERSITY campus, I peppered him with more questions, and he alternately shrugged his shoulders and made grunting noises. As we reached a fork in our paths, I said, “Oh, come on, Lew, you have something else you want to tell me, so why don’t you just spill it?”

Lew looked almost miffed. Then he said, “You want to know more about Dan and George, you come on Dan’s field trip tomorrow.”

It was the second time that day I’d heard that line. I’m slow, but I do catch on. “Okay, sign me up.”

He nodded. “The buses leave Snowbird at seven A.M.,” he said.

Snowbird. I had a feeling that I wasn’t going back to Snowbird, not if Officer Raymond and the Salt Lake City police force had their way. I figured that they were right to be concerned. If I embarked at the conference, who knew who might be watching me get on that bus? And I didn’t like what this Lew was selling, either, but I’d have to take the chance that he was greedy enough about his infernal information mongering that he’d keep quiet that I was going along on the trip, if
indeed he had anyone dangerous to tell. “Any way I can catch up with the game at the destination?” I asked.

“No way. The location’s a big secret.”

“Why?”

“Poachers.”

“Oh.” I let that go for the time being. “Anywhere else I can get on?”

Lew scratched his head. “I guess you could slip on at the Salt Palace. We’re making a detour past there to pick up some journalists about seven-thirty. Our Dan’s got to have the camera on him.”

“I noticed that about him,” I said. “Like today at the conference. A bunch of fundamentalists started picketing, and I’d swear Dan was more worried about upstaging them than disputing their ideas.”

Lew smirked. “Ol’ Dan scored big this time. They’re going to do a press conference on the evening news. That’s like hitting the jackpot for our Dan.”

“A press conference? For a protest rally?”

“Sort of. That way he can show off Vance’s work like it’s his own.” He snorted.

“Oh. Is that why Vance was so wound up?”

“Nah, Vance is always that wound up. He’s been working all summer on this location we’re going to tomorrow. You’ll see. His doctoral stuff is riding on it, but Dan wouldn’t let him remove anything from the site before the conference guys got a look at it.”

“What’s the problem with waiting?” I asked.

“Poachers,” Lew said again, as we parted near the walkway back to the Geology Department. “Always we got to watch out for them damned poachers.”

“You mean like people stealing game? Why? Do they get trigger-happy or something?”

Lew shook his head. “Naw, I’m talking about the guys who like to remove your fossils for you after you’ve gone to the trouble to find them and dig them out and get them ready to pop.”

“People do that?” I asked, appalled. It didn’t seem quite sporting to swipe someone else’s find.

Lew shook his head contemptuously, like I was hopelessly naïve.

“That’s disgusting!”

“Welcome to the big bad world.”

I couldn’t keep up with his venom. “So has Vance found something that’s going to rock the scientific world?”
That would have complicated things,
I thought.
If George kept stealing his thunder, Dan might have felt moved to go to extreme lengths to stop him from doing it again … .

“I’m sworn to secrecy. You don’t get on Dan’s digs unless you toe that line.”

“I hear that no one knew where George was digging, either.”

“Ha,” said Lew. “At least Dan eventually lets the world know where the fossils came from. Dishey probably
dreamed
the bones he wrote about.” He turned his back and began to shamble away up the walk toward the geology building.

“Wait!” I called after him. “Who are these poachers you keep talking about?”

Lew turned around, walking backward, still moving. He shrugged his shoulders. “Ask the commercial guys.”

I had about had my fill of people baiting me toward asking a question, then referring me to somebody else when I asked it. “Explain this to me, damn it! Who are these people?”

Lew turned his back to me again and kept on walking up the hill. “Who knows? Maybe it’s somebody local, maybe it’s not.”

He was waffling, and waffling meant he knew nothing more. At his level of the professional food chain, knowledge is power,
and he didn’t want the world to see his powerlessness. For the time being, I gave up.

BACK AT THE police station, I was in for a surprise.

“We found Nina,” Ray said as he turned down a hallway. He presumed I would follow him. He was right.

“Where?” I asked, dumbfounded. “When?”

Ray led me into a dark room. I’d been in rooms like this before, in the Denver police station. It was full of electronic recording equipment and had a window made of one-way glass, so that interviews in the next room could be watched and recorded without the subject’s awareness. When we had arranged ourselves in front of the glass, Ray finally answered my questions. Sort of. I mean, decency dictated that Ray had to say something. Nina looked like hell. Her appearance hit me like a blow.

“She was in the crawl space underneath a neighbor’s porch,” he said.

She was filthy from head to toe, her pale blond hair dingy with dirt and cobwebs. Her clothes were gray. I couldn’t see her face, because she had pulled herself up into a tight ball, hugging her slender knees to her chest as she scrupulously held the hem of her skirt down to her ankles with one hand. Her knuckles were white. A female detective sat in the room with her, going over her notes, reading them aloud in a drab monotone. “Suspect was asked her name. Suspect did not answer. Suspect was asked to state her residence. Suspect did not answer. Suspect—”

“Get her out of there!” I said.

“Want to help?” asked a voice behind me.

I turned. It was Detective Bert. Two other men stood beside him. I had been so shocked by Nina’s appearance that I hadn’t heard them enter the room. One was a kind of nondescript
middle-aged white guy and the other I had seen before. He was Tom Latimer, the dark-eyed guy with the salt-and-pepper crew cut who had tried to strike up a conversation with me at the conference. —the guy who had told me he was an illustrator of children’s books. Just as I had thought, the police had positioned plainclothes cops up in Snowbird to work the crowd.

I fought to control my anger—anger at the police for not believing my innocence, anger at these detectives for incarcerating pathetic little Nina, anger at Bert for being the shithead he was, and anger at Ray for reasons I didn’t care to name. To Bert, I said, “Yeah. Sure. You got some other damn thing you want out of me, you just name it. Just get that girl out of that room!”

“We can’t hold her much longer anyway,” the nondescript man said calmly. “We were just wondering if you’d like to talk to her. Maybe she’d tell you something. What you see in there is all we’ve got. She has no ID Her clothes are even handmade. No labels.”

I was ready to explode. The bland tone of this man’s voice somehow made me even madder than Bert’s usual insinuating, snide notes. “How long has she been in there?” I demanded.

No one said anything, which meant she’d been in there for quite a while. “What are the rules for retaining citizens without a warrant?”

No one answered.

I spoke again. “Okay, so you want me to go in there and get her to talk, have a real girl-to-girl tête-à-tête and get her to spill her guts. Lovely.”

The nondescript man nodded. “Yes, we do. We were hoping you’d like to help us with this; get this whole George Dishey situation buttoned down.” Bland, bland, bland—like let’s get this done so we can all go home a bit early.

I fantasized that if I’d had a bat in my hands just then, I would have started swinging. I wanted to hit someone real
bad, and not just out of righteousness. I wanted to get even with them for dropping me into this hall of mirrors just as surely as they had dropped in Nina Dishey. We were just two bugs being examined under glass.

But the true horror was that I wanted to know what Nina had to tell just as much as they did. Between my teeth, I said, “Let me in.”

NINA DID NOT look up when I entered the room. She just sat there, unmoving, as if she were made of stone.

I turned to the woman detective and said, “Could you leave us, please?”

She did.

I pulled a chair away from the table and sat down.

Nina was so still that she did not appear to be breathing. I began to think she was some sort of three-dimensional photograph.

I sat and thought for a while about what I was going to say, and what I was going to ask. Finally, I said, “Nina, my name is Em Hansen. You mistook me the other day for someone named Heddie. I’m sorry I didn’t straighten out that misunderstanding then. I’m just going to talk for a while, and maybe you’ll have something you’ll want to say and maybe you won’t. Be assured that whatever you say or do is being observed, and not just by me. I’ve sent the woman out of the room, but at least four men are standing on the other side of that mirror, watching, and they can hear everything we say in here. We’re also being filmed and our voices are being recorded. It’s what police do.”

Nina’s hands clenched her leg and hem, pulling the skirt even more tightly across her. I saw that the side seam had been hand-stitched with tiny, if somewhat irregular, stitches.

I took a breath and continued. “I am not with the police. I
am a geologist, like George. I had just arrived in Salt Lake City the night I met him. I am here for a conference he was going to attend. I guess they’ve told you by now that George is dead.”

As I said this last, Nina took one long, shaky breath.

I cleared my throat and spoke again. “So they’ve asked me to talk to you and they hope you’ll say something to me. You surely don’t have to say a word. I’m going to tell you something I don’t like about myself, and it’s this: I don’t necessarily have your best interest at heart. I’m in here because they don’t know who killed George and so they may as well think I did it. Until we find out who killed him, I’m on the hook, just because it looks suspicious that I Was at his house the night before he died. And so you don’t have the anxiety of worrying about what I was doing with your husband alone in that house; I was there as a guest of the conference and nothing more. I had never met George before. Our acquaintance was strictly professional.

“Now about you,” I continued. “You told me you’re his wife, and I believe you. They’ve been bugging you to tell how that can be when you didn’t live in his house, haven’t they?”

Nina did not respond to my question.

“Yeah,” I said, “so they’ve had you in here awhile, and that’s just awful. Have they given you anything to eat?”

Nina still did not answer me. I was beginning to wonder if she was in an ordinary state of consciousness.

I buried my face in my hands. I said, “I bet I’m beginning to sound like them. First they try food and then they try veiled threats. Who knows what other little intimidations they put to you. Bah. Dear God in heaven, help us both.”

I felt a movement in the room and looked up. Nina had turned her dirt-grimed face toward me, laying her cheek gently on her knees. Her face was swollen from crying. She moved
her lips, just one word with no sound, but I could make it out:
Amen.

Tears slid out of Nina’s pale eyes as she continued to look into mine. I began to cry, too. It was the only sane thing to do.

Nina ungrasped and regrasped her knee. I saw fingerprinting ink on her fingertips.

So they ran a check on her and found nothing,
I thought.
She’s absolutely clean. No ID, no labels in her clothes. She came out of nowhere. It’s like she doesn’t really exist.
“You’re like a missing part of George,” I whispered.

Nina shifted her head slightly, so that her face was not fully visible to those who stood behind the mirror. Her lips moved again.
I loved him,
they said.

I considered taking one of her hands in mine, then thought better of it. “Have they let you see him?” I asked.

She shook her head, just a tiny wobble.

I stood up and rapped on the glass with my knuckle. “Hey! You want to let a widow lady see her husband?” I asked angrily. “No more sideshow until Nina gets to see George!”

A moment later, the door opened and the unnamed, nondescript detective showed his head. “This way,” he said.

I said, “Where are your glasses, Nina?”

She looked up at the detective.

“Give the lady her glasses,” I demanded, once again on the edge of hollering.

The detective produced a large envelope, which held Nina’s thick, ugly glasses.

“Sign for this, please,” said the detective.