Bone Hunter (10 page)

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Authors: Sarah Andrews

BOOK: Bone Hunter

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“Are armored dinosaurs your specialty?” he asked.

“No.”

“Oh? What is?”

“Stratigraphy. I’m just visiting from the oil patch.” I was immediately sorry I’d said so much about myself. This man made me uncomfortable. Why was that?

“I see. Meeting some interesting people?” he asked casually. A little too casually.

“Sure.”

The man continued to look at me. I looked at him. Neither of us said anything for a moment. Out of nervousness, I asked, “So what’s your specialty?”

“I’m an illustrator. I do dinosaur illustrations for kids’ books.”

“Oh.” I let the volley of questions drop on my side of the net, hoping he’d just walk away, but he didn’t. He seemed to be waiting, and I wasn’t sure for what. I’d been to conferences
and conventions before, and had been hit on more than once; yeah, even a plain Jane like me. There are a lot more men than women in the geosciences, and youngish unattached females are considered premium game for convention funsies. But much as this man’s opening lines were typical of that kind of hit, there was something in his eyes that didn’t seem quite amorous. Or friendly. Not unfriendly, exactly, but let’s just say I didn’t get the buzz that he was trying to get sociable for sociability’s sake. My stomach began to tighten. I smiled coolly, said, “Excuse me,” turned, and headed straight for the exit of the tent.

I marched through the rain to the next building, which I knew housed the exhibits portion of the conference. Ray fell in thirty feet behind me as I searched out the exhibits room and found it. Inside, there were rows of tables with bored-looking vendors sitting behind them. The tables were stacked with flyers, pictures, technical widgets of interest to paleontologists, scientific texts, antique monographs, lavishly painted illustrations of dinosaurs, even sculptures. I wondered if this was the kind of work Tom Latimer did, but I couldn’t feature him sitting at an easel. I studied the men who sat behind the tables selling dinosaur art. They didn’t look much different from Latimer—same ordinary dress, same close haircut, but Latimer had seemed more … more what? More attuned to something other than dinosaurs.

I wandered down the line of tables, taking in the wealth and variation of materials for sale. A cast of the skeleton of
Utahraptor
strode the carpet, horrifying claws poised for the kill, long balance-beam tail curving to accommodate her stride. A life-size reconstructed head of
T. rex
yawned at me from a wall like a trophy head from hell, its eight-inch teeth luring me in for dinner, its tiny eyes glassy with lust. Not for the first time, I wondered at man’s fascination with the terrible, the horrifying, and the immense.

I came across one table that featured stacks of books by two paleontologists who were famous partly for the depth of their disagreement on each other’s interpretations of dinosaur behavior—Horner and Bakker, stacked right next to each other. I was wondering idly if the vendor was trying to start a friction fire when I found myself needing to scoot in closer to the table to let a man pass with his preschool-age son. They were a pleasant change from the overserious faces of the paleontologists, so I tracked the pair as they moved down the line of tables. When they reached an exhibit of special pastes used in preparing fossils for exhibits, the exhibitor grinned and leaned over his table to offer the kid a chunk of what looked like rock. “Here!” he said. “Want your own piece of dinosaur bone?”

“Sure!” said the kid. He reached out and took it, eyes alight.

The child’s father asked, “Is that real bone?”

“Certainly,” said the exhibitor. “I have a bag full of bits like that.” He popped his eyes at the child. “It’s part of the neck frill from a
Triceratops,
sonny.”

The father was as delighted as the child. “This is great,” he said. “The wife’s giving a paper here at the conference, and we just tagged along. I had no idea there’d be fun stuff like this for kids! What do you say to the nice man, Nate?”

“Thank you!” the child sang.

The father had one more question, the kind a man knows to ask if his wife is in the profession: “What locality did this fossil come from?”

The exhibitor pointed down the room toward a man wearing an Australian-style hat with one side of the brim folded up. “You can ask him. That’s the guy who gave them to me.”

The man with the hat had been strolling along the line of tables toward us with his hands in his pockets, looking at books. Just looking, not buying or even picking them up, as if he didn’t want to leave fingerprints. But when he heard
himself mentioned, he stopped abruptly, turned, and ever so smoothly walked away and out the back door of the room.

I turned to see if Ray had noticed the man, too. He had. I headed out the same door. The man was nowhere in sight. I moved quickly through the maze of hallways that wound through the building and found myself back outside.

The man with the hat was talking to someone near the walkway that led uphill toward the Cliff Lodge. For the moment, it had stopped raining. I took a moment to gauge the man, trying to understand what his purpose might be in attending the conference. Was he some kind of vendor? He seemed better dressed than many of the other conferees, less intellectually distracted, and almost theatrical in his choice of western-style vest and Australian hat. He wore no name badge. The instant he saw me watching him, he broke off his conversation and headed up the path toward the Cliff Lodge, his stride quickly lengthening.

I hurried to fall in beside him. “Enjoying the sessions?” I asked brightly, wishing I could think up a more sincere conversation starter than the illustrator with salt-and-pepper hair had unsuccessfully used on me.

The man with the hat nodded noncommittally and further lengthened his stride. It was a steep path, his legs were considerably longer than mine, and he was clearly in shape and used to walking. When he was well ahead, I heard someone speak behind me. “
He
sure as hell isn’t going to talk to
you
,” the voice said.

I turned, to find Vance, the weaselly little guy with the drooping blond mustache and broiled skin who had reported the problem with the poster tent to Sherbrooke the day before. “Why not?” I asked.

“Commercial collector,” he sneered.

I opened my mouth to ask him what a commercial collector was and why Vance thought one wouldn’t talk to me, but I
was interrupted by a heavyset guy with a wiry beard who was converging on us from uphill. He was wearing a T-shirt that read ORNITHISCHIANS DID NOT HAVE CHEEKS. “Vance, you old ectotherm!” he boomed. “Haven’t seen you since undergrad. Whose fire you toasting marshmallows on these days?”

I moved quickly out of range of Vance’s hissing reply. I wanted to stay well ahead of Officer Raymond, whose athletic grace was making the steep grade into flat ground, and I didn’t want to hear a piss-and-moan session about academic life. My brain was beginning to bog down from strain, lack of sleep, and a deepening sense of alienation. I had hoped in going there to feel like a colleague, or to at least feel like an accepted member of the geological scene, but I did not. People were avoiding me, and now even taking shots at me. What had I done to deserve such ostracism? Did they, like Officer Raymond, think I might have murdered one of their brethren? Or worse, did they lump me with George Dishey and presume I was a sloppy scientist? I wondered how long it would take to atone for my sin of foolishness and rid myself of that taint.

I pushed those worries out of my mind, telling myself that there were more important things to concentrate on at the moment. I told myself also that there would be time enough to probe the tough little minds of Vance what’s-his-name and Allison Lee a little later on, after I had poured a cup of hot black coffee from the urns in the lobby outside the symposia under way at the Cliff Lodge. I was wrong.

I WAS JUST RAISING THAT CUP OF COFFEE TO MY LIPS WHEN Ray materialized at my elbow.
Bam
, like out of nowhere. I hadn’t seen him coming. Just like the night before, when the gun went off. I jumped, spilling coffee on one of the magnificent Persian carpets that were so lavishly strewn about the floor. I almost swore, then wanted to swear again when I realized that I had suppressed that curse out of the embarrassment of thinking Ray was somehow better than I was just because he went to church and didn’t cuss. Or I presumed he was a churchgoer. I sure as hell wasn’t.

I turned toward him and fixed him with a glare I hoped would put him in his place, wherever that was, took a noisy suck at the coffee his religion forbade him to drink, and waited. The gesture was meant to say, How dare you presume to trot up to me whenever you wish?

But the look on Ray’s face cut right through my bluster. His taut body muscles said
alert
, his face said
urgent
, and his eyes said
now
. He took the coffee cup out of my hand, set it down, clamped a hand on my arm, and turned me toward the escalators that led down to the main entrance. “We have to go,” he said.

“Why?” I demanded.

“I’ll tell you on the way.”

“You’ll tell me
now.”

Ray glanced left and right to make certain he would not be overheard. “Someone’s already tried to get into your room at the motel,” he said. “If I’m going to keep you safe, this is not the place.” He had me moving now, in a beeline for the front doors. Suddenly, he jerked to a stop, his eyes wide.

I looked where he was looking, out through the glass wall at the exquisitely manicured ski slopes, which now glowed with the soft richness that only thick clouds and rainwater can bring out of autumn foliage.

“Below,” Ray said tersely.

I lowered my gaze.

Three tour buses had pulled up by the front entrance. Their doors were opening. People were climbing off, filling the driveway, now churning about, now opening the cargo doors, now raising placards that said GOD LOVES us! and DON’T INSULT OUR LORD! They swung the placards into position, turned with ominous quiet toward a hand raised by their leader.

I said, “What the hell—”

“Protesters,” said Ray. “We heard they might show up.” He changed course and steered me the opposite way, toward a flight of stairs that led to a side entrance.

I jerked to a stop in a protest of my own. “Protesters? What in hell’s name would anyone want to protest about a paleontology convention? And
wait!”
I tugged my arm loose. “Damn it, Ray! Who are those people and who exactly is this ‘we’ who heard they might show up?”

Ray tensed further as the sounds of chanting reverberated through the glass wall. “‘We’ is the police department.
They
are creationists. Now—”

“Fundamentalist protesters?
Really?”
I gaped toward the windows, fascinated. “You mean … Oh, I get it. They think paleontologists are out to get them because they believe in evolution.
What a crock!” Then it occurred to me that, as a Mormon, Ray might also be a creationist. Had I offended him? “So does ‘they’ also mean ‘not Mormon’?”

Ray raised an eyebrow sardonically and tried again to steer me away from the window.

I said, “Go? Just when things are getting interesting?”

Ray replied by dropping my arm and putting a hand over his face.

I was beginning to enjoy the way he said more with his body than with words; it was eloquent as well as extraordinarily sexy. I smiled at him, enjoying watching him just stand there looking exasperated. But then he took his hand away from his face and I could see that he had moved beyond annoyance to fear, and that fear shot straight into me. I had not wanted to hear what he had said about people trying to find their way into my motel room—I had wanted to think that that hadn’t made sense, that no one could know where to find me. But now my emotions cracked through the protective wall my intellect had built, and sheer terror roared in. It roared to the beat of the angry chanting that now flooded up the escalator well from the entrance below, and I whispered, “Why would anyone come looking for me? What do I know that could hurt anyone?”

Ray reached his hand toward me, palm up, in supplication. “Why would anyone shoot at you last night? We can get out this side door,” he said, and added, now raising his voice to be heard over the chanting,
“Please.”

We hustled down a short flight of stairs toward the side exit, only to find that way jammed with protesters, too. We shot across the lobby, and fetched up against the doors that led into the ballrooms where the learned talks were being presented. As we ran, I saw Dan Sherbrooke striding toward the main entrance, a look of mystified outrage pasted across his face. He seemed querulous, as if thinking,
How could anyone presume
to assault this extension of my personal being in this way?

Once again, I threw on the brakes. “Wait! Sherbrooke looks like he’s going to stir some shit here, and it might tell us something.”

The protesters now packed the opposite end of the lobby, barring all other exits. They had ceased their advance, content to intimidate with their chanting and the sheer numbers of their presence.

Ray opened the ballroom door and stared through to the far side. Satisfied that this provided us an exit through the kitchen doors, he held up an index finger and looked me in the eye. “One minute,” he said. “One.”

The protesters now began to sing, borrowing their tune from an old children’s hymn and cramming in words that didn’t scan: “God created us, how do we know? Because the
Bible
tells us so!”

Sherbrooke allowed them three verses and then raised one large pudgy hand. “Please!” he roared, “Ladies! Gentlemen! How may I help you?” His words were cordial, but his chin was raised in indignation.

A television reporter squeezed past the head of the phalanx and popped in next to Sherbrooke, pulling her cameraman with her. Sherbrooke drew her deftly to one side, helping her set up her camera angle. There was a ponderousness and a courtesy in his motions that suggested that he might just possibly have already been acquainted with her, might, in fact, have known that she was coming. As she finished adjusting her jacket and got her microphone lined up, a man in a pale green suit strode inward from the head of the crowd, approaching the camera. “Brethren!” he boomed, raising a hand in saintly greeting. He turned dramatically, slowly, regarding the room from one far corner to the other, then finally turned back toward the camera and swung his hand over his heart. “Brethren, let us pray!”

Sherbrooke drew his lips up so tightly that I could all but hear his anus pucker at the other end of his alimentary canal. He did not appear to like being upstaged.

“Almighty God,” intoned the preacher, “lend Your light to us today that we might bring the grace and majesty of Your truth to those gathered in this palace of earthly delights. Lead them in Your wisdom and teaching, that they might find the true knowledge of Your Word and discover the joy of knowing that You created them. Help them find Jesus, that they might enter Thy kingdom. Amen.”

“Amen,” murmured the protestors.

As he suffered the affront of being prayed over, Sherbrooke drew himself up even taller. His large soft eyes glared out through his glasses like dark goldfish perceiving a horrifying world. I could almost hear the gears in his braincase hiss into smoother running as the heat of his anger thinned the viscosity of their oil.

The preacher sucked in his breath to address him, but the reporter had already swung the microphone toward Sherbrooke.

“Gentlemen, ladies,” Sherbrooke said unguently, “thank you for your interest in our work. If you have any questions regarding our proceedings here, I am certain that this kind agent of the local media can arrange a
proper
forum from which we
all
might grow more, ah, enlightened. However, we do ask, if you wish to attend our conference, that you register at the front desk as the rest of us have done. The men and women who have assembled here have come from all across our fair continent—indeed, from continents all across the planet—to present their findings to one another in a
civili

ed
and scientific manner, and I do not wish for them to be harassed or interrupted in any way.”

Ray gave a tug at my arm. “He has them quiet. Good time to go,” he said.

“Just when the party’s finally getting interesting?” I said, laughing nervously. “Golly gosh, Ray, it looks like Brother Sherbrooke’s worked hard for this moment. The least we can do is give him the courtesy of watching.”

Ray turned his quick gaze from the crowd to me.

“This is
theater
,” I said. “Look at Sherbrooke—he’s all but laying Shakespeare on them. And that preacher, who wrote his lines? Come on, I’ll bet they met at a bar in Cincinnati and cooked this up for the publicity it would generate for both sides.”

Ray squinted at me in disgust.

“Well,
look,
Ray, I mean
really
look at them. They each need the other or there’s nothing to be dramatic about. Poor stiffs like you and me, we’re here to do our jobs—you know, try to figure out whether birds are really descended from dinosaurs, or find out who killed George Dishey. Those boys have a much more complicated agenda.”

Ray summarily put a hand against my back and shoved me through the door and out through the kitchens beyond, flashing his badge at each surprised face. Outside the service entrance, I caught sight of the man with the Australian hat. He was just pulling open the sliding side door of a van that was parked about fifty feet away, almost out of sight behind a big disposal bin. It struck me as odd that he would park there instead of in the main parking lot with the rest of the conferees, so I watched the man over my shoulder as Ray steered me forward. As the sliding door reached its fully open position, enough light filled the van that I could see that there was another man sitting in the backseat. He had a dilapidated appearance, all faded plaid flannel and patched jeans. His fingers were thickened from hard labor and his wrists thin and sinewed. Most spectacularly, he wore his beard almost a foot long, in a curtain of pale brown whiskers that fell straight from beneath his jutting cheekbones, hiding his mouth. As his head swung my way,
his eyes opened wide in surprise, narrowed, locked on mine, and then seemed to catch fire as a smile slowly split his beard from his drooping, feathery mustache.

My mouth fell open. It was the helicopter pilot from the photograph in George’s living room. I’d have known him anywhere. Not just because of his startling looks—now half-covered by the whiskers, a beard as long and straight as the one on the man who had shadowed me—but because of the light that seemed to burn from his eyes. Through those glowing eyes, he shot a toxic slug of emotions to me, an invitation mixed with seductive menace. I felt pierced, like a hot dagger had just been shoved through my heart. It was a helpless feeling, as if he knew something I didn’t and the only way I could be free of him was to kneel down and let him flow through me. “Ray!” I gasped.

Ray pulled me even harder, mercifully snapping my attention from the man in the van to himself. I swung my head to look into his eyes. He was concentrating, a look of irritation clamped on his face. I could tell he wasn’t listening, that he wouldn’t listen, that he was sick of my interference, that—

“That’s the man!” I whispered. I glanced back again. The door to the van was rolling shut.

“What man?” he muttered, still pulling me toward the main parking lot.

“Ray, listen!” I said, louder now. “There’s a man there in that van! I saw him in a picture in George’s house! And he looks like the guy who shot at us!”

Ray stopped and swung his attention to the van, but it was already rolling, disappearing down the service lane around the back of the building.

“He’s getting away!” I said stupidly, stating the obvious.

Ray dropped my arm and yanked a small spiral-bound notebook and a pen out of his breast pocket and began to write.

“Ray!”

“I got the plate number. I’ll call it in.”

“He was with a commercial collector,” I gasped, uncertain what that meant.