Presently, Sherbrooke turned to face the room. His eyes were wide and glassy.
Heads had begun to turn. Sherbrooke’s assembled colleagues observed him with the intense curiosity that only people with twenty-four years of schooling and decades of intense devotion to an investigative profession can generate.
Sherbrooke took a deep breath, lifted his chest like a thespian about to spew Shakespeare, and announced in a booming yet unsteady voice, “George Dishey is dead!”
Officer Raymond glanced quickly from face to face through the crowd, recording reactions like a high-speed camera. People turned from Sherbrooke to us. “Dead?” they gasped, like a many-headed creature with a hundred shuffling feet and two hundred voices, “He can’t be dead. I just saw him yesterday,” and “Was he ill?” and “What did he die of?”
I wanted to know that myself.
The crowd churned toward Sherbrooke, splitting around the tables laid with coffee to get a closer look at what was happening, their babbled questioning growing to an information-hungry growl. One man stood still, budding off the back of the flowing throng like a new creature coming into life, his behavior so singularly different that he drew my focus. He opened his mouth and barked, “About time you got that son of a bitch!”
The crowd turned to see who had spoken, opening a corridor down the middle of the room like the Red Sea parting for Moses. I peered sharply toward the man, trying to see his eyes past the glare of overhead lights reflected on a pair of glasses as thick as Coke bottle bottoms. He was built like a truck tire, with shoulders any footballer would be proud of and graying hair cut so short it was almost invisible. He wore a faded pine green T-shirt and chino pants so old they would no longer hold a crease. I slithered around the back of the crowd until I was close enough to read his name badge. MAGRITTE, it read—just the one name in smaller print—and in large type below it, EARTHWORM. His port of call—a junior college somewhere in California—had been struck out with a ballpoint pen, and handwritten below that was simply “Unaffiliated, God Damn It.”
Matching the dramatic flair of Earthworm Magritte, Dan Sherbrooke boomed, “It figures you’d say something like that,
Worm!”
Earthworm Magritte jabbed his glasses up his broad nose
with one short, thick finger. “Aw, hell, Dan, it’s a bummer when someone leaves the game. But shock-shock, he lived, he died. Move on. It’s not the end of the universe; it’s just one less thorn in your hide. More room for you to win the Golden Jawbone Award next time. But I suppose you gotta get dramatic and give us some homily on what a great man he was. That’s cool. Get on with it.” He offered these comments with no apparent contempt, only bald, if somewhat loud, statement of opinion.
In the ensuing silence, Sherbrooke rolled his head back until he could sight Magritte down his nose. Slowly, he spread one hand across his rubbery chest. When all eyes were on him, he uttered, “I am in a state of grief. A colleague has fallen.”
Magritte shrugged his thick shoulders. “Aw, the hell you say. A bullshit artist has gone splot in his own manure.”
Now Sherbrooke evinced anger. “I don’t think you know what you’re
saying,”
he tolled, his voice rounding like a southern preacher’s. “We’re talking about a man who has been
murdered!
”
The sharp, inquisitive eyes of two or three hundred paleontologists flicked from Sherbrooke back to Magritte, and I swung my head back too, just one more member of the Greek chorus playing Ping-Pong tournament spectator as the two major actors volleyed lines. I was thinking,
This is getting ludicrous,
but the look on Magritte’s face stopped me. His large, thick-lipped mouth hung wide, and his sandy eyebrows had flown up above his impenetrable glasses. “It actually
happened?”
he gasped.
Sherbrooke pointed to me. “Ask
her,”
he intoned. All heads swiveled my way.
I glanced desperately around for Officer Raymond, but he had faded back into the crowd. “Me?” I blurted. “Well, sure, I stayed at his house last night, but—”
“You see?” Sherbrooke bellowed, then turned and walked
away. On that nonsensical note, the Greek chorus mercifully broke up into a gaggle of clacking tongues and scanning eyes. Leaving good old me turning in the breeze, caught being unusual in a roomful of people who have made their life’s work that of studying—nay,
scrucinizing—
the unusual.
This is perhaps the place where I should emphasize this fact about paleontologists, so you will understand exactly how naked I felt. Half of them begin as geologists and half as biologists, but the point where they meet is in decoding evolution, and the study of evolution is all about spotting trends and divergences from those trends. And here I was a rank newcomer with a bandaged thumb, grass stains, and the hideous luck of having slept at a dead man’s house. They observed me clinically, watching to see what I would do and what would happen to me next. I couldn’t help but wonder if they had me pegged as an endangered species.
Grimly determined to look like the innocent bystander I was, I shifted my shoulders in line with the crowd and did some scanning of my own, recognizing some faces from television specials on dinosaurs, some names from the registration packet, others from the spines of my old geology textbooks. This was a gathering of the elite among vertebrate paleontologists, a rare, intense festival of note swapping and antenna touching among scientists, persons who as a class spent the grand bulk of their time working—by preference—in solitude. A moment ago, the atmosphere had been jolly and convivial; now, it was electric and edgy.
I noticed the scent of pine and turned to find out where it was coming from. Earthworm Magritte was standing about five feet to my left, staring at me with frank interest. He had his thick hands spread out on his sturdy hips.
“What’s the Golden Jawbone Award?” I asked.
“It’s the booby prize,” he answered. “A bronze cast of the holotype of
Allosaurus fragilis’s
left mandible, mounted on a
walnut plaque. We hold a kegger each year and give it to the guy who claims the most from the least evidence. They make a speech and gas away all they want while their audience gets stone-cold drunk. George won it the last three years running.”
“How charming. Just the thing I want for my ego wall. I’d put it right next to my diploma.”
Magritte recorded my quip without smiling. “You ought to see George’s ego wall. Or I guess you have. He took the jaw off the plaque two years ago and started carrying it to meetings, kind of brandishing the thing like a scepter. The king of fools.”
“Is that how you see yourselves?”
Magritte ignored my question. “He’d have it sticking out of his back pack on field trips to let the new recruits know he was
the
George Dishey. A real wise guy, our George.”
“So he thrived on being called a bullshitter.”
Magritte pushed at his glasses again. “In yo’ face—his favorite place to be.”
Officer Raymond reappeared at my side. “Who’s that guy?” he asked, gesturing toward an elderly man with an aquiline nose. “And that woman, and—”
I glanced back at Magritte. He had vanished. To Officer Raymond, I said, “One at a time. The nose is a famous Brit. Analyzes dinosaur tracks; you’ve seen him running down beaches on TV, prattling about the rate at which the big leaf-eaters could trot. Don’t know the woman.” She was petite and sharklike, with a sharp nose and fashion glasses. She was doing the same thing I was, looking from person to person to gauge reactions, her jaws rhythmically working at a wad of gum. “That guy,” I said, acknowledging the next person Raymond nodded toward, “is Jack Horner, out of Montana. He’s a MacArthur fellow. You know, the genius award. Crichton modeled the paleontologist in
Jurassic Park
after him. The guy next to him is Dave Gillette, another biggie; he did the
Seismosaurus
dig. That next guy I don’t know. Probably studies fossil shrews or something unsexy like that.”
Raymond gave me a sharp look.
“Big vertebrates are where it’s at in paleontology if you want to catch the public’s interest,” I said, the wild nervousness of the moment loosening my tongue. “I don’t know much about bones, never been to a meeting like this before, but just look at how many of the players I recognize, and they’re all big-bone guys. Shrews are probably in some obscure way more important to keeping the earth turning on its axis, but it’s the dinosaurs, those big dead reptiles, that capture the hearts and minds of the TV-watching public. Myself included. So if you’re a big-bone paleontologist, TV interviews are where it’s at, and PBS or the Discovery Channel or someone’s gonna beat a path to your field location and photograph you expounding on your incredible find, with fabulous western scenery in the background and your hair blowing away from your bald spot. Unless you’re Robert Bakker; that guy always wears a hat.” I looked around. “I don’t see him here.”
Raymond’s eyes had taken on the slight glaze of someone doing some high-speed fact filing. “And George Dishey was a dinosaur paleontologist,” he said.
“Exactly,” I said.
“Specialized in carnivores,” said Earthworm Magritte.
I spun around. He was right behind me.
He said, “Carnivores—that’s where the really big money is.”
Raymond’s eyes snapped toward him.
Magritte said, “It’s not just the books and T-shirts and the lunch boxes and the little plastic action models you get with your burger at McDonald’s. Dinosaurs themselves are worth a lot of money. The bones. It used to be potsherds; now it’s dino bones. Everybody wants some for their museum, or coffee table, or maybe slabbed open to use as bookends.”
A bit unhinged to find him behind me like that, I opened my big yap and said, “I suppose the Chinese think they’re a tonic when ground up and served just before—” I was about to say “sex.” My tongue was running away with me. It’s an arrogant little trap that always lurks about a step in front of fools like me who have trained our brains more fully than our wits. Worse yet, I was falling into it right in front of this police officer, this man who had been assigned to ride herd on me through this conference, this man who had the odd intimacy of thinking that I might be a murderess. There was an electricity to the moment, of standing there that close to a man who held that much potential power over my future, feeling the heat of his breath as he bent to hear me over the din of the room. I caught myself examining the way the soft fabric of his off-duty shirt draped the firm muscles of his chest. I caught the scent of maleness and good soap, imagined that I would feel a pleasant humidity in the cloth. I looked away. I had been showing off, trying to impress him. I was making an ass of myself. “I need to settle this business about my talk,” I said abruptly, and walked away.
WHEN I HAD AT LAST FULLY CONVINCED MYSELF THAT THE talk I had taken great pains to prepare was not going to occur, I set to work pumping people for information about George Dishey. I didn’t ask Officer Raymond if he wanted my help. I did not in fact care whether he wanted it or not. Beside the obvious reason of needing to get off the suspect list and on with my life, I knew that there would be no better time to pry into these other people’s lives than when they were still interested in mine.
As I circulated through the crowd, sliding in and out of conversations with the astonished conferees, I watched Officer Raymond work. Something more than his good looks kept drawing my eyes to him. There was an intensity to him. His work was clearly important to him, more so than was called for by mere attention to detail and correctness, or by the ambition of wanting a promotion. He consumed each person just as he had consumed me when our eyes had finally met in the hospital. He seemed to be searching for something essential, something he craved. As I watched him, I thought,
An appetite for truth is something I can understand.
I worked through the obligatory gaggle of people who wanted to hear the scant nothing I knew about the murder of
George Dishey. More important, they wanted to gush away about how shocking they found the situation, and speculate wildly about who might have done it. Smart money assured me it must have been a mugger, or some crazy from the hills, but just a few others wanted me to know that George was not universally liked, don’t ya know. These bolder souls would quickly catch on that Officer Raymond was listening a little too intently, suddenly realize that I was with him and not them, and clam up. The talkativeness that comes with a sudden shock like hearing that one of your colleagues has been kakked was beginning to wear off, and they were returning to a more normal, more wary state. I figured I’d have to wait until I returned the next day without my police escort to get down to any meaningful gossip. And by then I knew that, even if Detective Bert told me I was free to go, I would return. I was bitten. The chase was on, and I wanted to know which one of these sons of bitches had gotten hot enough to murder my manipulative, shit-stirring little host.
At length, the coffee break we’d interrupted broke up and people confusedly meandered back into the symposium that actually
was
scheduled for that afternoon, something about predator-prey ratios in the Mesozoic. I tried to listen to one of the talks, but I realized that, for the moment, the revised cladistics of early Triassic diapsid quadrupeds and its relationship to a hot lunch was a bit too abstract for my overstimulated mind to grasp.
Officer Raymond drove me back to George Dishey’s house after first phoning ahead to the police station to confirm that I was free to go home. Except, of course, that George Dishey’s house was not my home.
On the way down the mountain, Officer Raymond began to pick my brains. “No one appeared to be withholding evidence,” he said.
“Scientists specialize in evidence,” I replied with no small
pride. “And we know all about coughing it up when the time is right. Professional ethics require that we make a clean presentation of the facts. Or at least what we consider the facts to be.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“We’re talking about a bunch of people whose careers depend on being the first with the latest,” I replied, “And think about it: They’re dealing with scanty records of animals who’ve been dead a long time. At least you cops get a fresh corpse.”
“Can you enlarge on that?” he asked, his voice tightening.
I stared at his handsome profile, wondering for the sixth or seventh time what condition George Dishey’s corpse must have been found in to warrant such sensitivity. Police officers saw the results of violent death as frequently as anybody. They grew inured to it. What could have gotten them so stirred up about this one? I considered asking him, but it didn’t take a genius to know that the police weren’t going to budge with the information. The more distinctive the mode of death, the more carefully they would conceal it from the public, and that public included me. That way, they could weed through the crank calls and nutcase confessions that would soon be finding their ways through the police switchboard, and if they found someone who could accurately describe the techniques required to create the gruesome evidence, they would know they had a winner.
I knew that for the moment, I had to content myself with being forthcoming, in hopes of convincing the professionals of my innocence. I fell back into being a fountain of wisdom. “Back at college, I took a class in paleontology, and the dinosaur stuff was pretty interesting,” I began, already embellishing the truth. My undergraduate course had covered fossils from
A,
for algal mounds, to
Z
, for—well, not for dinosaurs. We had spent a few days on dinosaurs, but I had read a little since—Jack Horner’s
Dinosaur Lives,
Dave Gillette’s
Seismosaurus,
and a few others—and had seen a few television specials. “The thing is that in order to fossilize a dinosaur, you
have to bury it really quickly. Otherwise, all the other dinosaurs—or at least, the carnivorous ones—will eat it and scatter its bones. In order to bury something that big that quickly, the best bet is to have it die in a river; say, by drowning. That happened a lot.”
Officer Raymond brought his squad car expertly down the wide turns that carried the highway past the red and gold foliage that would soon be a dead brown litter underneath the winter’s snows, past the myriad avalanche chutes that would soon be laden with deadly slabs of white death, and out of the mountains, his shoulders and arms moving with hypnotic grace. Now he merged onto a belt of highway that rushed us along the ancient broad lake terraces that formed the upper reaches of Salt Lake City. I couldn’t tell if he was listening to me or not.
Filling the loneliness I was beginning to feel, I continued anyway. “Just think of modern elk herds crossing a river. The waters are swollen from a sudden storm. Something makes them stampede, perhaps a lightning bolt. They panic, push one dino brother into deeper water. Too deep, he loses his footing, can’t swim.
Bam
, drowned quadruped. So anyway, your dinosaur dies in the water where it has a chance of getting buried in the sand that’s being carried down the river, but then the water itself starts working on the corpse. It takes a lot of sand to bury one of these guys. Some of them weighed ten, twenty tons. So anyway, the carcass starts to rot, and the first thing that happens is the big joints start to come apart. The first thing that usually comes off is the head, then a leg. Particularly with some of the big brontosaurus-type herbivores. Their heads weren’t on all that tightly, and
boing!
Off it goes downstream. The flood’s over and the water level drops, and
whang,
some scavenger chews off another haunch. Maybe all that gets buried was part of one foreleg and a chunk of the backbone, and the rest gets eaten or ground up by rocks saltating downstream. Then you’ve got to wait a few hundred million years, hope what’s left isn’t so deeply buried
that you’ll never find it or that it didn’t erode away a few hundred thousand years before you were born, and then
wham,
you’re out on your horse one day looking for a lost calf and maybe you get lucky and happen to spot it because the sun angle is just right. Then you’ve got to hope you know what a dinosaur bone actually is, and not confuse it with some old cow bone, or with the surrounding rock.”
“Why would that happen?” he asked.
“You mean, why would someone think it’s a cow bone?”
“No, rock.”
“It’s often the same color. The bone gets mineralized.”
“Oh.” His gaze stayed trained on the roadway.
I’d been making some pretty wild gestures as I spoke, typical of geologists and other geoscientists, like paleontologists. People make jokes about us. They say, If you want to make a room full of geologists shut up, tie their hands to their sides. Now my hands dropped to my lap and I cleared my throat. “I’m just saying that most of the time, here in human time, you find your corpse in one piece, and—” I stopped. Was that it? Had some fool dismembered George Dishey? My mind slipped out of intellectual mode and my stomach tightened. “Hey, just what happened to George, anyway?”
We had exited onto city streets, still following the contours of the shores of Lake Bonneville, the Pleistocene inland sea that had drained and evaporated into the present-day shallow ghost of a sea called Great Salt Lake. We passed the University of Utah and maneuvered into the quiet old residential neighborhood beyond it where George Dishey had until this morning lived. Officer Raymond’s eyes were on a truck in front of us, his expression unreadable. “The house is down here on the right,” he said softly.
I looked down the street. Two cars besides my own were parked in front of George Dishey’s house. We pulled up to the curb, got out, and walked up to the front door, which stood open
in the early-evening warmth. I stepped inside. The evidence team was just finishing the task of searching the interior.
I was blasted by a voice from one corner of the room. “Ah, the girl geologist, back from the bone conference!” I turned. Detective Bert straightened up from an examination of one of the many bookcases, and said, “How’d it go, Sherlock?”
Ignoring his question, I hurried into the room where I had slept the night before. My suitcase was open, and my belongings, from blue jeans and sweaters down to the most intimate bits of flimsy, were laid out none too tidily on the bed. I opened my mouth to complain, then snapped it shut.
“Oh, were those yours?” Bert asked unctuously from beyond the doorway.
I gave him a look but kept my mouth shut. He had taken advantage of his mandate of searching the dead man’s house to go through my things, too.
“Well, here’s your keys,” Bert said, dangling them from a finger. He oozed up to the doorjamb and draped his body insolently against the wood. “And here’s a spare key to the front door. Or do you plan to stay?”
My back molars nearly cracked under the compression of my jaw muscles. I wasn’t going anywhere, not if this man wanted me to leave.
He said, “You keep in touch, hear?”
I advanced on him, determined to back him out of my room and out of that house. And he did leave, grinning all the way with that sick way of his that had no heart behind it. I had slammed the front door before I realized that Officer Raymond was still inside with me. “Excuse me,” I said, yanking the door open again. “I’m, um, sorry.” I needed him to leave—immediately. It had been a gruelling day, I was a long way from home and anyone I could call a friend, and my cut thumb was beginning to throb like someone was hitting it with a hammer. If he didn’t leave fast, he was going to have to watch me cry.
“You okay here?” he asked.
“Fine. Just fine.”
He handed me a card. It read “Salt Lake City Police,” had a logo, his full name, Officer Thomas B. Raymond, and a phone number. “You call me if … well, you know, if you think of anything else that would help the investigation, or if you … you know, need anything.”
“Sure,” I said. I knew he was trying to be chivalrous, but knowing that his real reason to stay in touch with me was something else again—to solve a crime and maybe get a promotion out of it—left me feeling deflated, like I was somebody’s kid sister whose company was more a chore than a pleasure.
“You got food in the house?”
“I … I’ll go out if I need anything.”
“You-”
“I’m
fine,
damn it!”
Officer Raymond observed me for some seconds, then turned, nodded good-bye, and left. The door closed slowly behind him.
Through the windows, I saw him walk down the lawn toward the street. His lean, limber body flexed gracefully with the unconscious motion of walking. When he reached his squad car, he paused for a while with his hand on the handle of the door, his eyes closed, his face set in an expression of solemnity. I thought I saw his lips move, as if he were speaking to someone who was standing quite near to him. After a moment, he climbed into the car and drove away.
I watched the empty parking space for seconds that stretched into minutes, feeling more lonely than I’m used to feeling when I’m alone. I considered getting into my rental car and driving back up to Snowbird. They would be having dinner now, listening to someone blather away about something of great interest to bone junkies. What had been on the menu? I shook myself. Prime rib. I couldn’t stand the idea of eating, much less of putting a knife to freshly killed flesh.