Bone Hunter (28 page)

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Authors: Sarah Andrews

BOOK: Bone Hunter
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“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?”
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 slicing 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.”
My smile had turned to concrete. “Thanks. I needed that, I’m sure.”
Not Tom smiled again. “Think nothing of it. Still sure you want to do this?”
“Sure. There aren’t any wires out there. We’re talking about the back side of nowhere.”
“I don’t care who’s backside you’re flying around. Power lines are the least of it. Don’t forget—don’t you
ever
forget—that this time you’re going out there because you think the boys who got George Dishey might be waiting for you.”
He was right. In my chase for the truth—in my haste to be
right
—I was leaving myself open.
 
 
NOT TOM TURNED the car in through a gate onto the tarmac of the rural airport. The facility consisted of several low buildings and a gas pump, a few planes tied down, and, on the far side of the runway, a row of hangars. He parked the car and we got out and stared up into the sky, to the rising bluffs to the south, and down the long straight face of the Book Cliffs to the east. “Almost five,” he said, fidgeting with his car keys. “You’re running out of daylight.”
“They could have gotten here faster by road,” I said, smiling. “But then I wouldn’t get to go flying. I don’t care what you say, I’m excited about that.”
“Great.” Not Tom pocketed his keys and turned up the collar of his jacket. His face had gone wide-eyed and stiff, like a cowboy readying himself in the chute for a ride on a Brahma bull. He suddenly winked at me. “Let’s hope Ray ain’t the airsick type,” he said, a teasing smile finding its way onto his lips. As he continued to look at me, I stopped smiling, and he dropped his smile, too.
“You know anything about the Mormons?” I asked.
“A little. I’m not a Mo myself, but I’ve been out here a bunch of years. You pick it up after a while.”
“You sound like we’re discussing a foreign language.”
“May as well be. The church is, in fact, a subculture, anthropologically speaking. Its members have their own way of looking at things, their own way of talking, even.”
“So now you’re an anthropologist? What are you going to be next week, a rocket physicist?”
He gave me an acerbic look. “I haven’t always been an FBI agent,” he said. “But even in the Bureau, we study things. The more you understand people, the better we can do what we do.”
“May I know what you think of the Mormon church?” I asked.
Not Tom considered my question. “They have strong families. They don’t drink, don’t smoke. They cooperate toward building a strong society, humble themselves before something bigger than they are. They look after their own. Those are all good things.”
I wished I could look at things that simply. I’d built a life for myself in Denver. It was a small life, work-harried and solitary, but satisfying enough of the time to get me past the days when I felt inclined to question what I was doing. Then I’d come out here and gotten shot at and found myself close enough to Ray to feel his heart beat, and the genie was back out of the bottle. The previous evening sitting at the Raymond family table had put me up against the fact that I felt alone and afraid in a universe in which others found contact and security, and today I’d met people who were relaxed enough to delight in the doglike auras of herbivorous dinosaurs. My cosmos was in an uproar, all previous sense of order disordered. So I gave Not Tom my most piercing look and said, “What aren’t you saying?”
Not Tom stared at his feet and kicked idly at a pebble that had found its way onto the blacktop. “I try not to judge people for their beliefs, as long as they don’t infringe on my liberty. I’ve done my best to make peace with these things, and I leave them to make theirs.”
I stared at the agent, this matter-of-fact man in his middle years. He was the kind of guy you might not notice, unless you look at who’s left after you subtract all the people around you who are doing something nutsy, or trying to get your attention for some neurotic reason or other. He seemed to be just hanging out, thinking deep thoughts, and watching the ball game of life. I said, “You’ve made peace, huh? How’d you pull off that little bit of mental jujitsu?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Well, I used to make myself crazy trying to decide what was true and what wasn’t, that kind of stuff. Then one day I figured out that there were more than two categories in this life; not just true and untrue but also a third category. Call it ‘I don’t know.’ In science, do you make yourself nuts over the questions you haven’t even thought to ask yet?”
“Sometimes. It’s a possibility I have to consider.”
“Well, I bet you don’t lose sleep over it. You tell yourself you’ll never get it all figured out anyway, so why get so uptight? And just because you can touch and smell and taste and see and hear the physical world doesn’t mean that a metaphysical world doesn’t exist right next to it, or on top of it, or in the same place. And if it does, that makes room for all sorts of possibilities.”
“You mean like astrology, or auras.”
A gust of wind whipped down the runway, trailing the wind sock out straight across it, a sure sign of a coming storm. A flash of lightning blanched the clouds behind us.
The agent saw this, too, and looked reflexively toward the pass, from which he hoped to see the arriving helicopter. Nothing.
He said, “I don’t make any sense out of star charts, and I sure don’t see glowing coronas around people’s heads, but that doesn’t mean someone else doesn’t. Huge portions of the world rely on astrologers, and when it comes to auras, why else would the medieval artists paint golden halos around the heads of saints?”
“There’s a connection I’ve never made.”
“Precisely. In my business, you learn to look at evidence from new angles, or you’re going to miss something that’s staring you in the face. Such as the possibility of being wrong about everything. But like I say, as long as no one’s getting all het up about things and assaulting my liberty to think as I please, and as long as I’m behaving myself, too, no one’s getting hurt.”
“And so maybe if someone believes the earth is six thousand years old—which sounds like hooey to me—and they can’t perceive what I see—a divine, systematic beauty in a much older, evolving earth—maybe that’s okay.”
Not Tom smiled another tease. “What the hell,” he said. “Everybody’s got to have a gimmick.”
“So do you think the Mormons might be right?”
“About what?”
“About anything.”
Not Tom’s smile broadened. “Boy, mething’s sure got your fire lit. Or some
body
.”
“Yeah,” I said simply. I had learned something from Magritte after all: that being direct and dropping the defensive bullshit had a certain charm, and got business done a whole lot faster.
The agent raised his eyebrows appreciatively. “I heard it said once that the maturity of a civilization can be measured by its ability to laugh at itself. Maybe the Mormon culture can’t do that yet.” He shrugged again. “But what the hell, maybe mainstream America hasn’t arrived at the belly-laugh
stage yet, either. And like I said, Mormonism is a subculture. Or call it a ‘tribe.’ Different from your tribe, I’ll wager, different in big ways. It’s hard to change tribes, real hard.”
We heard the sound of an aircraft engine and both immediately turned around, the wait beginning to press on our nerves.
A small plane that had taxied to the end of the runway had started its takeoff roll. I watched it accelerate, rotate its nose upward, dip a wing into the cross-wind, and rise into the late-afternoon air. Five hundred feet into the sky, it turned eastward and darted away from the storm. I looked westward. The clouds over the pass seemed to be thinning.
I kept talking to distract myself from the tension that was consuming my bowels. “Okay,” I said, “you’re talking about laughing at yourself, as in the ability to see ironies. But what about lies? You got a place for them in your pantheon?”
“Lies?”
“It seems to me this whole case—for that matter, everything that’s happened to me since I arrived in Utah—has revolved around lies. George Dishey was a gold-plated liar. He lied to get me here. He lied to his colleagues, it seems, pumped out lies and fiction and plain old wild-assed ideas just to keep the joint jumping. He lived a lie with Nina. I’m betting a lie got him killed. But how did he get away with telling lies for as long as he did? His colleagues tried to throw him out long ago, but they couldn’t, could they? No, because he just popped up somewhere else, dishing up his exciting stories to the popular press. They couldn’t blow the whistle then. Why not? Because they didn’t want to look priggish, or, worse yet, they didn’t know for certain which part of George’s palaver was truth and which was fiction. It’s the uncertainty we all deal with in the sciences, and if you don’t stay humble, you wind up just as buffoonishly vain as old Dan Sherbrooke, setting
yourself up for one kind of a fall or another.” Nervousness was making me garrulous again.

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