Bone Hunter (29 page)

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Authors: Sarah Andrews

BOOK: Bone Hunter
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Not Tom said, “Ah, so that’s why we heard Sherbrooke credit Dishey’s ideas as having stimulated research. His ounce of humility.”
“Yeah. And the irony is, he’s probably right about that. Science is done by human beings, after all, and, as you say, we have a way of collecting into tribes. The Flat Earth tribe, the Expanding Universe tribe, the Survival of the Fittest tribe. It’s something of a stunt to think original thoughts when you know you’re going to get a whole lot better funding for your project if you agree with the status quo. Sometimes it takes a gadfly like George to annoy people into new ways of thinking.”
“So you’re saying that scientists are not always impartial.”
“Hah. We get wedded to prevailing beliefs just like the next person. The difference with most of us is that we take pains not to lie. Like John told me on the bus today, we trust each other’s honesty. If we misinterpret data, we’ve made a mistake. If we get hooked on a belief beyond the point of reason, we’re lying to ourselves. But it astonishes us when someone blatantly, consciously lies.”
“Then I can see why George Dishey had such an easy time of lying.”
A small falcon plummeted out of the sky and nabbed a rodent that had unwarily ventured too far from its burrow. “Right. So where are lies on your ‘Yes, No, I Don’t Know’ scale of reality? How far can lies coexist with the truth?”
Not Tom ran a hand through his short, graying hair. “I wish I knew the answer to that,” he said. “I could take early retirement and go fishing.”
“You must deal with liars all day long. Aren’t most criminals liars of one sort or another?”
Not Tom nodded and glanced at his watch. “Some are prize liars like George Dishey—pathological liars, regular sociopaths.” He scanned the western sky for the arrival of the helicopter.
I knew I was beginning to lean on the man, but there was something elusive I had not yet grasped about the whole George Dishey conundrum, and as the sun began to slide toward the western horizon, I felt I had to grasp it quick before I got on that helicopter and flew out into who knew what. I needed to understand who was out there, what was waiting for me. “I couldn’t lie to save my life. At least not to anyone but myself. I gave it up in adolescence. It was just too difficult to keep track of what I’d said to whom. If I told the truth, I could keep track of it, because the truth makes sense to me. So how do criminals get away with it? Don’t they teach you something about that in FBI school?”
Not Tom rocked from heel to toe, still watching the sky. “Sure they do. You see, the best way to tell a lie is to attach it to the truth.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if you’re going to lie, you wrap it around something that’s true, so if you get caught, then you just say, ‘I made a mistake about that part, but this other part is true,’ and that makes you look like you meant well. If you can keep people misled, or confused, you’ve got ’em.”
“Like George attaching a ‘special symposium’ lie to an ‘SVP Conference’ truth to get me to come to Salt Lake.”
“You got it.”
“But what did that buy him?”
Not Tom turned his head to look at me, examining me in a new way. “An honest face to stand next to him. A little truth by association. You’re a nice kid. You wouldn’t have made a stink, and if you had, he’d have fed you some other line of
bullshit, like that the symposium was canceled for some reason or another.”
I fell quiet for a moment, letting “nice” and “honest” be compliments, drawing a tiny sip of nourishment from them.
Not Tom changed the subject. “So if you’re right about Nina, George has been digging down here for quite a while.”
“Hadn’t you been watching him?”
“I only started looking into his activities a few months ago. I had to clear some other caseload and then start setting up my cover.” He shrugged his shoulders, hands in pockets. “This murder just kind of ripped the case open.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“No, that’s a bad thing. The police were able to get to his hard drive at his house before the guys with the rifles got there, and that’s good, but maybe it’ll be enough to lead us to the rest of the ring, and maybe not. George was not at the center of the network. I may be able to clean up his corner, apprehend his underlings, but in doing so, I may lose any chance of following them back to the linchpin, and it’s the connections to the central brains we’re trying to get.”
“Then you know who that is?” I was appalled. All this, when they knew who was behind it?
“Sure. These guys work right out in the open. They attach the lie of theft to the truth of doing business with the public. But George was too high-profile to run the shop. And too compromised by his ego.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Sherbrooke thing. Petty competition. That’s a waste of energy if you’re a crook. George was supporting his habit, staying in the game, but a shit-stirrer like him couldn’t really run the show.” He made a gesture of dismissal, a flicking gesture with one hand.
“Or maybe he was driving Sherbrooke to find bigger and
better things, so Dan would do his excavation work for him.”
Not Tom considered this. “I don’t think so. Didn’t you say he sounded angry or upset when he was called out Sunday morning?”
“Yes. Oh, I see what you mean. So you think whoever ripped off Sherbrooke’s site with the backhoe phoned George and told him about it, and that was how they got him to go to the storage unit so they could kill him. So they didn’t actually have the bones with them. It was just a ruse to get him there.”
“Mm-hm. Yeah, that’s what I’ve been thinking, ever since we saw Sherbrooke’s site. And because of the way George was killed.”
“What do you mean?”
“You go to the trouble of draining the blood out of somebody’s body like that, dragging it around so the blood can soak into the soil, it has to mean something.”
“What?”
“Someone didn’t like George’s brand of bullshit so much that they decided it was time for him to pay. Spilling blood onto the ground is the big payment.”
“Explain.”
“It’s what the Mormons call blood atonement. Grisly little custom.”
I didn’t fully understand what the man was saying to me. We were scanning the skies now, hands in pockets, watching for that helicopter like it had our lives riding on it. “So you had the same ideas I had. Why didn’t
you
call the Salt Lake police this afternoon instead of me?”
“You got to the phone ahead of me. And I have to say, your idea about using Nina as a decoy is inspired.”
“Should I take that as a compliment?”
He looked at me again, out of the corners of his eyes. “I don’t think so. You see, now you’ve involved an uncontrollable
variable. And perhaps an innocent bystander, not to mention a possible minor.”
“The police liked the idea,” I said defensively.
“Bert bought it. Ray was against it. Me? I just wouldn’t have had the balls.”
I tried to take this criticism like a soldier, but I felt my heart sink. I was finding that I liked this man, liked working with him, and wanted him to approve of me, or at least admire my methods. “You’re right,” I said simply.
He nodded, recording my contrition. “The thing is, you understood Nina perfectly, and that’s why they’re going with your plan. Understanding character and motivation is half the game. And if you’re right, if Nina comes to ground out here in the swell and leads us to the people we think she’s going to lead us to, we’ll have a nice tight case. But we have to keep you alive, because you’re the only one who saw Willis Teague with our friend Smeely.”
“So what is the game? What are these people up to, and why is the FBI involved?”
He leaned back, trying to release the tension in his spine. “They collect fossils on federal lands without permits. They fake the location records, make a specimen from another county, or even another state, sometimes even another geologic time. Then they pretty it up—take a bit of earth history and make it into a bauble—big dino in scary posture, which maybe it never struck in life—and then they sell it to the highest bidder. They create the market, jacking up prices by playing one bidder off against another, working people’s greed and vanity just like the worst of the antiques dealers. You see, fossils used to be history. Now, they’re decorations. You should see their inventory—I’ve attended the big fossil show in Denver. Made me sick—huge hall full of any kind of dead animal or plant you might want to collect. Everything from shark’s teeth mounted on refrigerator magnets to a big
Edmontosaurus
—full mount, three hundred and thirty thousand dollars, delivered anywhere in the world, make your corporate offices so much more attractive. And that’s just the unsexy dinosaur. That
T. rex
they called Sue went for eight million at Sotheby’s.”
“What kind of people are these?” I asked, recalling the slick, conservative look of the commercial collector who had eluded me at the conference.
“Most of the pros work within the law. They work only on private lands or Indian reservations, giving the owners a cut. It’s still baubles instead of history, but it’s legit. But then there are the guys who love to bend the law. They’d do it no matter what business they were in. They like to think they’re smarter, somehow above the law. Or they they think the law should be changed to suit their business interests, so why not just behave as if they’ve already been changed?”
“The permitting laws?”
“That and the Antiquities Act. They want the whole works repealed. They lobby hard, and when they can’t get what they want by playing fair, they go the other way. You’d be amazed. We’ve got paper trails that lead into every Federal agency involved, even the Forest Service and the U.S. National Park Service. They have little stoolies letting them know when the patrols are going out, so they can nip in and get the bones when nobody’s watching.”
“But those guys
have
a job. What do they want to get involved with organized crime for?”
“It’s a lifestyle thing, usually. They get into a habit like gambling, or driving fancy cars, things their salaries can’t support.”
“So they’re lying, too,” I said.
He looked at me sharply. “What do you mean?”
“They’re compulsive. When you’re compulsive, you’re lying to yourself, not admitting that the gambling rush or some
damned object you buy with your blood money isn’t going to make you happy, isn’t going to fill the hole in your soul.”
Not Tom favored me with another smile. “You’re good,” he said. “Want a job?”
“What, with you?” I smiled back. “But you’re a liar, too.”
He put a hand mockingly across his chest. “I?”
“Yes, you. Your name ain’t Tom Latimer, and you ain’t no artist. Unless your artistic medium is bullshit.”
Not Tom shrugged equitably. “You’re right, of course. Lying for the truth is like killing for peace. But …” His voice trailed off. He glanced at his watch again.
“So what are you going to get the bad-guy commercial collectors for, collecting without a permit?”
“Nah. Some local magistrate will let them off with a wrist slap—a hundred-dollar fine for plundering a hundred-fifty-million-year-old site. Some nice local joy boy who’s known the collector all his life and thinks I should go back to Washington and let the locals make a living. That’s a kind of lie right there: It’s okay to steal if we do it to put food on the table. You see? The ‘we need food’ part is true, but the method of getting it is not.”
“Because it’s against the law?”
Not Tom rammed his fists farther into his pockets, shoving his shoulders up nearer his ears, finally showing some emotion. “What’s a law? A law’s a reflection of the will of the people, or a good one is. But laws are slippery, easy to disavow, depending on whose ‘side’ you’re on, just like our local magistrate who thinks I should go back to Washington. Don’t ask me how many times I’ve fudged my taxes. No, a law is not enough to get you on the flying bucket of bolts you call a helicopter, not enough to send you out into the desert to look for people you’ve never met who disemboweled a man you didn’t like. What makes you go is the lie. You go because you want your truth to gain the upper hand. Am I right?”
We both stood quietly for a while, watching the western sky. In a small voice, I asked, “What’s
your
truth?”
“My truth? My truth is leaving the campsite better than I found it.” He laughed, a quick snort. “Doesn’t sound like much, does it? You can say, Who gives a shit about dinosaur bones anyway? Don’t we have enough of them? But I say no, life is precious, every minute of it, and every detail of every creature that lived before me, and every creature that hopes to live after me.”
“We’re all on one earth,” I said.
“That sure is how I see it. Those bones are part of our history and our heritage, and at least on these federal lands, we’ve been able to claim them for the people. That’s democracy in action. You wouldn’t let someone walk into your classroom and start tearing pages out of your history books, so why let them steal any part of what those books are written about? It’s time to value
natural
history just like any other part of ourselves.”

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