Bone Hunter (14 page)

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Authors: Sarah Andrews

BOOK: Bone Hunter
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“You’re saying Vance is a little overwrought.”
“Now you’re talking.” Lew started switching off lights.
“Gotta save energy,” he mumbled, as we left the room.
I thought,
So you think Vance killed George. Or you’d like me to think he did. Why?
“Now it’s your turn,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“You want anything else from me, you tell me what you got on Dishey first.” He observed me through narrowed eyes, a parody of the smart guy extracting information from the stooge, or was he hiding a deeper intelligence than he let on?
I thought for a while. Should I tell him about the man who had ransacked George’s house, or just give him the bare essentials about the sequence of the phone call and George’s abrupt early-morning departure? “I don’t know much,” I said.
Lew grew truculent. “Sure you do.” He looked insulted.
“Well, like I told the police, George left early yesterday morning, before it was light out. Someone phoned. He went. Next I know, the police have found his body.”
“Where?”
“They won’t tell me.”
“How’d they kill him?”
“They won’t tell me that, either.” Shifting the interrogation back to him, I said, “How well did you know George?”
He lifted his shoulders a half inch and dropped them again. “Not well. He was around.”
“Who’d he hang out with? He have any friends?”
Another shoulder twitch. “Some of his old army buddies. Okay bunch.”
“Like maybe a helicopter pilot or two.”
“Maybe.” Lew’s eyes narrowed and opened again, as if he was thinking, or trying to cover his thoughts.
“You know a guy he hung out with who maybe had high cheekbones and a long beard like the pictures of Moses?”
Lew’s lower jaw shifted forward a fraction of an inch. After a moment, he said, “No.”
He’s covering something.
“He have a wife?”
Lew considered. “Don’t think so.”
“So you didn’t know him that well.”
He shrugged again. I was treading on thin ice: It would not do to push a knowledge broker too far off the edge of what he knew. He might start making things up just to sound important.
I said, “He like little girls, maybe?”
Lew smirked. This was clearly a new idea to him, and he liked it.
With disgust, I said, “Well then, that’s all I know. Show me more about collecting, would you?”
One more shrug. “Okay. I’ll take you to the collections room.” He led me down a short hallway and up a ramp to another room. This one was much larger, both wider and longer, and it appeared to turn a corner at the far end. The underground guts of the building showed—supports and large pipes and conduits running this way and that—but fitted in around these necessities, packed floor to ceiling, were specimen storage cabinets, hundreds of them. Specimens of classic fossils winked out at me from every corner: mastodon skulls from the Pleistocene, turtle shells from the Cretaceous, dinosaur bones by the bucketload. The sight was overwhelming.
As we entered the space, a slender woman stood up from a table and met us. She fixed dark, richly luminous eyes on me and smiled. “Hi, are you here from the conference?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m Em Hansen.” I pulled my name badge out of my pocket to show her.
She extended a delicate hand. “Jane Whitney. I’m the museum’s paleontology collection manager. Sign in here. What would you like to see?”
I looked around the immediate area. A man sat at a wide table, scrutinizing a fossil turtle. Catacombs led off deeper into the basement, all lined with more drawers of specimens.
Lew spoke. “Em here’s just trying to get a feeling for things. She’s trying to figure out what all the shouting’s about.”
“Um, yes,” I said. “I’m a stratigrapher, not a paleontologist. But I’m trying to learn more about fossil collections and collecting. I’ve been in a lot of museums, but I’d never dreamed that there was so much in storage beyond what the public sees.”
“Oh, yes,” Jane replied. “In fact, there are some museums that have no public displays.”
“Why?”
“They’re purely working collections.”
“But why not share them with the public?”
“No money. Not enough money or manpower to prepare the specimens for display. Look here,” she said, pointing at a large block of rock still swathed in its protective plaster jacket. “This shouldn’t even be in here. The dust off the plaster is a problem. But we had no place else to put it. This is the pelvis and partial spine of
Allosaurus.
It’s an important find because it was partially articulated. It will tell us lots about how the bones set together in life. That is, when we find time to train a volunteer to prepare it. There’s no way we could afford paid preparators for all of these.”
“But once you’ve prepared it, will it go on display?”
“Probably not. The public doesn’t want to see just the pelvis and spine. Now if it was just the skull, that would be a different matter.”
“Oh.”
“Most just don’t know enough biology to be interested in only the pelvis and spine, unless it’s really huge, or the only part of that particular creature on record.”
I thought of what Vance had said about size and smiled ruefully. “I understand that much of your field collecting is done with volunteers, too. I’m wondering how that works.”
Jane’s warm eyes grew even warmer. “To tell you the truth,
I sometimes wonder myself how we get them interested. After all, you’re out there in the blazing sun with gnats crawling into your ears and warm beer and bad spaghetti for dinner, dry camping, with no place to wash, but you rue the day you’ve got to go back to town.” She shook her head, smiling at the memory.
“Why?”
“Because when you find something, it’s better than any feeling you can imagine.”
The joy of discovery. Every geologist, no matter what stripe, understood that. “You just want to know a little bit more,” I said.
“Always. We scratch away for every little clue we can get that tells us something about how these animals lived. Not just how big they were, or how they stood or swam or crawled, but how they
lived.”
She laughed, leading us down an aisle into the catacombs, where she turned her palm up toward a case filled with huge teeth and jaws. “Take the dinosaurs, for instance. Everybody gets so het up about what killed them, what made them go extinct.” She pulled out a drawer. “An asteroid, some people say. Climate change. Mammals eating their eggs. You know what grabs me? Not how they died, but how long they
lived.”
She selected a jawbone twice the length of my hand and laid it tenderly across my palm. “Feel the serrations along the edge?
Allosaurus.
Each tooth is curved back toward the throat. She bites you, you’re caught. Notice how it’s actually two bones, hinged in the middle. Most carnivorous dinosaurs had that. It gave the jaw flexibility, so it could hold on to an animal that was thrashing.”
I held the jawbone with care. “It looks like the bronze one George Dishey had, only smaller.”
“Yes. This one’s from a juvenile.”
As I goggled at the ferocious biting equipment that rested on my hand, marveling that it had belonged to a child, Jane
pulled out other drawers, zeroing in on favorite specimens. “The dinosaurs were around for a hundred and eighty million years, lived on every continent on the earth. They were more diverse and advanced than you’d imagine, and I’ll bet we haven’t even found examples of whole groups.”
“Why not?”
“Some of their ecological niches would not have been preserved, and if the sediments they died in weren’t preserved, then
they
weren’t preserved. Like any alpine species.”
I had never thought about the possibility of alpine dinosaurs, but it was true—mountain habitats were not preserved in the rock record. It was the plains that were preserved, the areas where sediments eroded from the mountains were deposited by the action of wind and water. The bones of any animal that died in the mountains would be ground to dust as they were borne downhill. “But alpine dinosaurs? Really?”
“There are alpine birds. Ptarmigans. They grow white feathers in the winter, so they can hide in the snow. But remember also that the global climate was much warmer during the Mesozoic, so we aren’t necessarily talking about snow. And they could have migrated up and down the mountains, like many modern mammals, such as sheep and deer. We know they lived in the Arctic regions, because we find their bones there. So they must have migrated long distances, just to follow the vegetation. Like elk.”
“Elk,” I echoed. I imagined Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with hadrosaurs grazing by the lakes instead of elk. “Herds.”
“Yes. And they cared for their young, some of them. Adapted like crazy.” She stopped by a drawer, pulled it out, and handed me two short black bones. “Metatarsal bones—the foot. The same bone from two different allosaurids. See how this one is smooth on the end and this one rough? Disease.”
“Arthritis?” I asked, amazed. It had never occurred to me that dinosaurs might ache like humans do.
“Not that, but something like it. Here’s a rib that broke and healed crookedly. See the extra bone that built up around the injury? There are people who study just the diseases evident in museum collections. Dinosaurs were wonderful,” she continued, replacing each bone and drawing out others for me to examine. “They evolved to fill every major niche of the terrestrial ecosystem, even flight. And you and I, our kind have been lucky to walk upright for three million.” She shook her head slowly. “And it doesn’t look like it’s going to take an asteroid to kill us.”
“Yeah,” said Lew. “We’ll just kill each other.”
My shoulders tensed. For a moment, I had relaxed into the pleasures of learning. Suddenly, I was back on a murder case, watching my back.
Jane said, “Yes, we do have our problems, don’t we?” She considered the rough-ended bone in her hand. “Disease.” She placed it back in its place in the drawer. “Pollution. Ignorance. Greed.”
Taking care to keep my voice calm, I said, “Tell me about the greed.”
Lew spoke. “Yeah, that’s where George Dishey comes in. Him and Sherbrooke always had to one-up each other.”
Jane said, “Heavens, I heard that George died! Isn’t that terrible? Dan must be beside himself. They were roommates at Yale, weren’t they?”
Lew said, “Yeah. But Sherbrooke came from money; Dishey came from a blue-collar background, like myself.” He looked at me through narrowed eyes.
Jane said, “Oh, you hear a lot of gossip about those two, but you shouldn’t take it seriously.”
“Try me,” I urged.
Jane unlocked a metal case, and I was immediately engulfed in the reek of crude oil. She pulled out a skull that looked new, save for a thin coating of tar. “Know what this is?”
“Wolf?”
“Exactly. Dire wolf, La Brea tar pits, Pleistocene. Looks like new, huh? That’s because it is, geologically speaking. It isn’t even mineralogically altered.”
“Neat. But what about Dan and George?”
“Oh, Dan got a grant; George had to get a better grant. George found a fossil; Dan had to find a better one. Dan got a girl; George had to … well, you get the picture. Dan published on some little anatomical thing he’d figured out, George went into print just to say Dan was full of it. Or he’d find out what Dan had discovered and publish something about it in the popular press before Dan would dare to. It’s not a nice story. They really both ought to be embarrassed. Well, at least Dan might still be.”
“But Dan won. He got the jobs, the status within the society. How’d that happen?”
Jane closed the tar pit case and leaned against it. “I shouldn’t be talking about this.”
“Why? It seems a lot of people don’t want to talk about this.”
“It’s a small community. You don’t badmouth people.”
Lew snorted.
I said, “We’re talking about a murder case.”
Lew snorted again. He was beginning to remind me of a pet pig a high school friend of mine once kept.
“Vance said George sold bones,” I said. “That sounded like a big deal. Why?”
“Look at it this way,” Jane said. “You can’t get the information you need from a bone you buy at a shop; it’s too far removed from its context. You need the bone in place, lying
relative to other fossils.” She gestured with her hands, staring down into a dig site she saw laid out before her in her mind’s eye. “You need the reference of the surrounding rock outcrop, and all those other little clues that tell you how it lived, how it died, how it got buried, all that. And you need all that information with the stratigraphic sequence above and below, so you can know how old it is relative to other similar specimens and what environmental pressures it was encountering, so we can make interpretations regarding evolutionary pathways. Without all that, it’s just a bone.”

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