The Dinosaur Hunter (23 page)

“The way I read the dirt,” he said, “I think this happened in the late Cretaceous, around sixty-five or seventy million years ago. So the question is why have we found them so well preserved?”

“You're already told us,” Laura said. “They were covered with mud.”

“That's how,” Pick replied. “But my question is why?”

“I don't understand,” Laura said.

“OK, let me put in a different way. Why are we finding these creatures now? Why was deep time flipped on its head to bring them to the surface at this moment?” When Laura shrugged and the rest of us reacted with querulous frowns, Pick said, “I believe it is because the time has come that we—meaning our civilization—learned the lessons these bones can teach us.”

This was too much for Laura. “That's crazy, Pick! You're talking like there's a big God in the sky who left us a note by arranging these bones this way. I totally reject your hypothesis. Why are these bones here and so well preserved? It's simply the random result of millions of years and the death of millions of animals. This is just what happens to be. The result of a cosmic roll of the dice.”

“Einstein said God does not play dice with the universe,” Pick replied.

“He later refuted that,” Laura growled. “You're going too far.”

“If you're right, Pick, what is the lesson?” Jeanette asked, cutting to the chase.

“I don't yet know,” Pick answered. “But we're getting close.” He pointed at the unexcavated dirt. “The answer lies there.”

We crept forward—our shovels, our ice picks, our trowels at the ready. “No you don't,” Laura said. “We pedestal and jacket the rest of these bones before we move a teaspoon of any more dirt.”

“That will take days!” Tanya protested.

“It will take what it takes,” Laura said as Pick regally climbed back on his perch.

We were up at first light and, as soon as we got some coffee and breakfast under our collective belts, went back to work. As we pedestaled and jacketed and moved the bones down the hill, I kept marveling over the crushed skull of the big T. rex that lay atop the smaller one. Stuck in it was a tooth over a foot long. Whatever animal had planted that tooth through three inches of solid bone had attacked with enormous force, energy, and passion. But why? Self-defense was my instinctive answer but Pick was hinting it was more. The answer, as always in paleontology, was in the dirt.

Blackie Butte was more than the pyramidal peak we had taken down to a stump but actually several connected outcrops, smaller hills, and peninsulas. When we eased up for lunch, Tanya asked me to meet her on a narrow dirt bridge which had several small cedars perched on it. I agreed, making a detour by my tent for something I wanted her to have. Well, two things. I settled beneath one of the cedars on the earthen outcrop and enjoyed the view until she arrived with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and sports drinks, the latter to replenish the lost salts caused by our labor. She also had a salt shaker and suggested that I sprinkle some on my hand and lick it off. Of course, I would have preferred to lick it off her hand, as I'd seen Pick do once, but I did as I was told. We sat there quietly, enjoying our meal. When we were finished, she put her hand on my knee. “Thank you for our night together, Mike,” she said. I thought it was me who should thank her and was about to say that very thing when she said, “That night Toby was murdered, I am ready to tell you about that now.”

“You don't have to tell me anything,” I said, even though I was eager to hear it.

She smiled. “I think you have a great passion for the truth. Yes, I will tell you this.” She took my hands in hers. “The night of the dance, Toby found me sitting on one of the picnic tables. I was enjoying the music, looking at the lake, and, I must admit, thinking of you.”

She gave my hands a squeeze, I squeezed hers back, and she kept going. “Toby said he knew I was a whore but since he was a fellow Russian, he did not think he should have to pay me for sex. He said I should go with him into the trees and take care of his urges. When he grabbed my wrists—he was so strong, Mike—I told him I did not understand why he wanted me. There were many men at the dance and I was sure one of them was who he really wanted. If we have sex, I told him, he would only be closing his eyes and thinking of a man. This made him very angry but he did not deny it, either.”

She was squeezing my hands so hard they hurt but I didn't say anything. I needed her to keep talking and she did. “When he walked away, I watched him and before he got far, a man came from behind the marina building. They stopped and talked and then they walked into the trees. It was the government man. Ted Brescoe.”

This, as they say, was a jaw-dropping moment. “Say that again,” I said.

“Ted Brescoe and Toby went into the trees together.”

Well, that at least cleared up why Ted and Edith's marriage wasn't exactly made in heaven. Tanya fell silent, so I prompted her by saying, “But the next morning, you were in Ted's room.”

“Oh, Mike. It wasn't his room. It was mine! I had reserved it, hoping you might join me that night.” She took her hands away. “But I saw at the dance that you only had eyes for Jeanette. I am not blind so I went to my room alone.”

I saw no need to deny my love for my lady boss. I put my brain in fast rewind. What had Earl, the marina owner, said when I asked him about Ted? He'd said, “Ted's in room thirteen.” He didn't say it was his room, only that he was in it. A good cop would have asked a follow-up question or two. Of course, I'm not a good cop, not anymore, anyway. “But the next morning Ted was in there with you,” I said.

“When I came outside in the morning—the mist coming off the lake was so beautiful—I found Ted curled up on the deck. He said he'd slept there all night. He was filthy and his clothes were torn. I knew nothing about Toby's death so I let him come in to wash himself and go to the bathroom. I swear, Mike. That's all that happened.”

“So…” I let the word hang for a long second but I didn't have a finish for it. So
what?
Had Ted murdered Toby? But, if so, why the knock on the head and throat cut the same way the bull and the cows had been killed? Would Ted do that and did that mean he'd also killed our bull and the cows? He was an unpleasant fellow, make no mistake, and him murdering the Russian wasn't entirely impossible, but killing cows? A Brescoe from Fillmore County? And what about the fact that Ted's truck was in the marina parking lot all night. Why hadn't he just driven home? “Curiouser and curiouser,” I said. Then, I actually asked a cop-like question. “That morning, when you let him into your room, did you see any blood on Ted?”

“No. Did you?” I confessed I hadn't until I'd beat him up, and she said, “Later, I asked myself did Ted kill Toby? My answer is I don't know.”

I pointed out the obvious. “Ted was the last man seen with Toby before he turned up dead.”

“As far as we know,” she said.

“As far as we know,” I agreed.

Well, this was all a fine howdy do. Even with these revelations, I didn't know much more than before. It didn't even prove that Ted and Toby had decided to play kissy-face or kissy-whatever in the woods, only that they'd gone into them. For all I knew, they went in there to discuss the latest stock averages and whether the Yankees were going to win the pennant. Then again, Toby had next been found floating face down in the lake. Then again, Ted curled up on the deck of the marina motel the next morning didn't indicate a strong need to run from the scene of his crime. Then again, why didn't Ted drive home that night, in any case? Then again, Ted was an idiot. Then again, I still didn't have a clue who had done what to whom. Then again, why did I care?

The answer to that last one was I still had a suspicion that a load of coprolite (so to speak) was about to be dumped on all our heads because of Toby's murder or maybe for some other reason I had not yet discerned. “What are we to do?” Tanya asked.

“Wait for further developments,” I said. This turned out to be a stupid answer. What we should have done was jumped in our trucks and four-wheelers and run like hell. But who knew? I should have but I didn't. Maybe I thought we were so well armed we could handle anybody who wanted to do us harm. Or maybe I was just too stupid and tired to think straight. Probably a little bit of both. This, folks, is how things like the Alamo or the Titanic happen. So far, so good, and then, well, you know. Here come the angry Mexicans or the iceberg.

Anyway, I opened my backpack and gave Tanya my presents, the ribbon I'd bought her in Jericho and Ray's short-barreled .22-caliber pistol. She loved the ribbon but wasn't sure about the gun. “This little pistol probably won't kill anybody,” I told her, “but it might stop them long enough for you to get away.”

“Mike, you're scaring me.”

“Good. Sometimes, being scared is what keeps us alive.”

She took the pistol and I gave her a quick basic course which was pretty simple like the gun itself. It had a safety and a trigger. It was already loaded. Keep the safety on until time to use it. Then aim and pull the trigger. Nothing to it. Tanya put it in one of the voluminous front pockets of her cargo pants and I felt compelled to remind her once again about the safety.

We went back to work pedestaling, jacketing, and hauling. It took us two long days but the rest of the bones of the two T. rexes were removed from the dirt and carried or slid down Blackie Butte. To get the giant leg bones and skulls down the hill, Ray and I rigged up a pulley system using the winch on the tractor to inch them down. We had a few pinched fingers and toes but, otherwise, the work was done without mishap. Of course, there were strained muscles, damaged backs, and a variety of abrasions and contusions but, as Laura said, that's why God made ibuprofen. When we laid them all out, the big white jackets reminded me of tombstones in a cemetery.

When the top T's skull, which required a block of plaster the size of a refrigerator, was lowered, we stood around it feeling a sense of awe at what we had accomplished. Inside its jacket was not just the bones of the skull but quite a bit of the matrix in which it was found. The thing had to weigh at least a ton. Pick said preparators in the laboratory that would work on the skull preferred to include the surrounding rock and dirt because they could use their specialized tools to remove it without harming the bone. This made sense but it also raised the question (to me at least) as to where the two T. rexes and the crushed baby T were going after we finished our field work.

I found Jeanette sitting in the dirt of Blackie Butte, her back braced against a boulder of sandstone, her eyes closed, and her brow knitted in pain. This was the prevalent rest posture of dinosaur diggers. I picked a nearby boulder to sit on and waited patiently until she at last opened one eye and took note of my presence. “So,” she said, “you deign to speak to a fallen woman?”

“I was just wondering where these bones are going?”

“Pick said we ought to move them to our barn after we finish,” she said.

“I guess we can make room.”

“We? Are you still working for the Square C?”

It was the perfect opportunity to make my quitting official but, to my disappointment, I found I couldn't do it. “I don't know. Am I?”

“What would I do without you, Mike?”

“For one thing, you'd have to hire a cowboy and pay him some decent wages.”

She thought that over, then said, “How about a ten percent raise if you stay?”

I felt the urge to tell her where she could put her 10 percent raise but instead, I said, “Sounds good. So, the bones are in the barn. What then?”

“Well, Pick says we can negotiate with a university or museum or maybe even the Smithsonian to take the bones and prepare and study them. He'd work with them, of course. After that, the bones would be ours to sell. It would take a few years but he thinks we're looking at several million dollars.”

I gave Jeanette a hard look. “Laura says if any of the bones end up in private hands, their value to science will be lost forever.”

“Well, that's why they'll go to the Smithsonian or somewhere like that first.” She looked at me. “Mike, these are my bones. Just drop it.”

I had done my best for science. I don't know why I was arguing about it, anyway. Hell, for that matter, I didn't know why I had agreed to keep working for the Square C. I was a pretty confused puppy at that point. And tired. That was it. I took a breath, then said, “OK, but how about this? To keep your bones safe, maybe we ought to go ahead and take them to the barn. I could bring in the big truck and load them up with the tractor and then Ray and I could go back and forth until we got them moved.”

“I suggested that very thing to Pick,” she said, “but he said he doesn't want to take the time now. He says it's best to forge ahead.”

I didn't think that was the best strategy and said so but Jeanette was also tired and waved my objections away. “I'll sit Pick down and talk to him about this later,” she said. She studied me for a moment and then said, “Mike, I want you to know what you said in the surgery about how you feel about me, well, that meant a lot.”

“I'm glad it did, Jeanette,” I said.

Since I didn't want to talk about that, I stood up and took a step down the hill, stopping when I heard her giggle. It was a giggle that turned into a laugh. In fact, she started laughing so hard there were tears curling through the encrusted dirt on her face.

She looked at me looking back at her in shock. “Oh, Mike, I'm sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of her filthy hand. “But kissing me with that cow shit on my face…every time I think about it, I can't help but laugh.”

“Well,” I said, “I guess I can't be too mad. I'm always saying you don't laugh enough.”

She chuckled a few more times, then her smile faded. “I never loved Bill Coulter,” she said, “but I respected him. I decided early on to become the woman he deserved.” Her eyes turned soft. “He never loved me, either, but he knew he'd found a woman who could help him build the Square C into a profitable, modern enterprise. When we had Ray, we knew we had a partnership that only death would end. Still, I confess sometimes I missed being loved. Until you said it, Mike, no man ever told me he loved me. I'm sorry it happened on the day it did. You should have told me earlier.”

“What was the point?” I asked, my voice small even in my ears.

She pondered my question. “Maybe it's this heat or maybe because I'm so tired or maybe it's because I've been listening to the crazy things Pick says but here's what just popped into my mind. Could it be that everything that's happened, from the moment Pick arrived, was so you'd have to tell me you loved me? Does that make sense to you?”

“No,” I said. Then, after a moment of reflection, I said, “That would be something, wouldn't it?”

“A domino falls so that all the other dominoes fall, too. But there are dominoes we can't even see. All leading to love.”

“I wouldn't try to float that one at the next Cattleman's Association meeting, Jeanette.”

She nodded. “Anyway, Mike, thank you.”

A man expressing love to a woman who replies with an expression of gratitude is not going to be happy. That was me at that moment. Although I knew she was through with me, I had another thing to say. “What would you think if I had someone move into my trailer?”

The surprise on her face was palpable. “Tanya?” she asked.

“Yes. If she wants to. I don't know that she does.”

“I don't think that would be a good example for Ray.”

“You're right,” I admitted. “Maybe I can get a place in town.”