Murder on the Silk Road

by Stefanie Matteson

  They paused at the crest of a ridge overlooking a steep ravine. Taking a seat at the base of a giant boulder, they gazed out over the landscape. Though it had cooled off considerably since midday, the boulder still retained the heat, and leaning against it was like leaning against a warm radiator.

  Charlotte removed her coolie hat and let the breeze that had come up as the day had waned play over her burning temples.

  Below, a plump mother sand grouse led her brood across a patch of ochre-colored sand that had collected in a low-lying area at the foot of the ridge. She looked like a cross between a pigeon and a partridge, but her walk was more ungainly than either one.

  “Their toes are padded like a camel’s so that they can walk in the sand,” said Lisa, who was also looking at the grouse.

  “They remind me of Larry,” said Charlotte. “He was telling us at dinner that night about his last meal; it was sand grouse, or rather, Tétras au vin à la Dijonnaise.” As she spoke, she reminded herself that she should track down Larry’s cook and ask him some questions.

  “Ah, yes,” said Lisa. “Eat well, dress well, sleep well. Well, I guess those days are gone.” She sat with her long legs stretched out in front of her. Like the sand grouse, she was also shod for the terrain—heavy boots of the type usually worn by lumberjacks or construction workers.

  Charlotte coveted them. If she kept up these hikes in the badlands, her sneakers were going to be torn to ribbons.

  “As near as I can tell, localities thirty-four to thirty-seven must be on the far side of the next ridge,” Lisa said, pointing at the ridge that paralleled the ravine below them on the opposite side.

  It took about fifteen minutes for them to clamber down one slope and back up the other, and another ten to climb to the top of the next ridge. Thirty-four was near the top. Exposed to view was the skeleton of a small horned dinosaur with a long name, a relative of Protoceratops. Lisa pronounced it a very nice find.

  The next locality was partly concealed by an outcropping. But once they had scrambled down the slope to get a better look, even Charlotte could see that this was Larry’s “find.” It looked as if the hand of God had laid out a box of giant Lincoln logs in a dinosaur pattern on the purplish-red slope.

  “Holy shit,” said Lisa as she caught site of the skeleton. Grabbing Charlotte’s arm, she just stood there, muttering the phrase over and over again. It was an incantation: “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.”

  “What is it?” asked Charlotte. It was clear that it was that rarity that Lisa had spoken of—a fully articulated skeleton—and it was obvious that it was huge, but beyond that Charlotte had no idea what it could be.

  With Charlotte in tow, Lisa slowly drew nearer, all the time staring at the enormous mass of bones and muttering “Holy shit.”

  The skeleton was as long as a city bus. The tail alone must have been twenty feet. It stretched across the hillside, each vertebra the size of a turkey platter. The four-foot thigh bone reminded Charlotte of the line from Ozymandias about the “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” in the desert.

  Lisa still wasn’t talking. Her bulging jaw hinges were moving up and down like a mute trying to utter a word that wouldn’t come out.

  “What is it?” Charlotte asked again.

  “A T. rex,” she finally replied as she removed her camera from its case. “Virtually complete, except for the skull. Every piece in the right place. T. rex on the half shell.” Moving closer, she circled the skeleton, taking a series of shots from various angles.

  Looking out over the long tail, Charlotte noticed the narrow band of black that marked the K/T boundary layer snaking through the far wall of the ravine. Then she suddenly realized that it was below where they were standing. “It’s above the K/T boundary layer!”

  Lisa nodded. “By about five hundred feet. There’s absolutely no doubt that this is Tertiary strata,” she said. “Our reptilian friend here might as well be wearing a T-shirt that says ‘I Survived the Death Star.’”

  For once, Larry hadn’t been exaggerating. Not only was it the biggest find of the century, with the possible exception of Andrews’ discovery of the dinosaur eggs, it was, according to Lisa, probably the biggest find of all time: a nearly complete T. rex. Apart from the skull, only a few foot bones were missing, and they might yet turn up somewhere nearby. Not only that, it was above the K/T boundary layer. The chance that a nearly complete skeleton could have been churned up from older sediments and redeposited above the K/T boundary layer with each bone in its proper place was nil. Larry’s discovery of the T. rex was irrefutable proof that the gradualists were right. It was also a good bet that it was the reason for his murder. At the moment, Charlotte’s chief suspect was Orecchio, who wouldn’t have wanted to see the theory on which he had staked his professional reputation invalidated. But there were a number of problems with Orecchio as a suspect.

  Theoretically, Orecchio murdered Larry to destroy the evidence that refuted his theory, hence the missing page in the field log. But it seemed to Charlotte that there was a good chance that some other member of the expedition would eventually have discovered the T. rex skeleton, if not this year, then next. In which case the murder would have been pointless. But Lisa thought otherwise. She agreed that there was a chance, but it was a slim one. Finding dinosaur fossils wasn’t an exact science, she said. It required a practiced eye, a nose for fossils, and a great deal of luck.

  “It’s easy to miss a fossil,” she told Charlotte as they headed back to the guest house. “Sometimes it’s just a glint of bone or an outline in the rock. If your mind is on something else, or if the light’s wrong, or if you’re looking in the other direction, you can miss it.”

  “But this was more than a glint of bone,” said Charlotte.

  “Yes, but it was also hidden underneath that outcropping. Someone else might have been five feet away and still not have seen it. As for next year—it might not be there next year. All it takes is one big sandstorm, and it’s buried for another couple of million years.”

  “What about elsewhere?” asked Charlotte. “If Larry found a fully articulated skeleton in Tertiary strata, isn’t it likely that another one would turn up somewhere else in the world?”

  “Possible, but not likely,” Lisa said. “At least, not in Orecchio’s lifetime. And he probably doesn’t care what happens after he’s dead, as long as he’s succeeded in preserving his scientific reputation while he’s alive.”

  They arrived back at the guest house at about seven-thirty, dirty and sweaty. As Charlotte was washing up for dinner, she thought about her conversation with Lisa. If Larry’s murder was going to be pinned on a member of the expedition, Lisa obviously wanted it to be pinned on Orecchio. But there was another motive for killing Larry that Lisa hadn’t brought up, perhaps because the idea was so distasteful to her. Larry might have been murdered by someone who wanted to stake his own claim to the T. rex skeleton. The person who discovered the T. rex would go down in the annals of paleontology, just as Andrews had for his dinosaur eggs. Was a reputation in the pages of the history books worth the risk of murder? Charlotte thought it was. And for this motive, there were any number of suspects: Bouchard, who had the advantage of proximity; Peng, who may have wanted to claim the find for the Chinese; and even Bert and/or Dogie. She would have to find out what all of them had been doing between the time when Larry had left the compound and the time when she had found him dead. No doubt they would all claim to have spent most of that time in bed, which would leave her exactly nowhere, but she felt as if she should go through the exercise of inquiring anyway.

  She was trying to figure out How to go about this, when circumstances decided the question for her. On her way to the dining hall, she stopped at the guest house’s souvenir kiosk to pick up a packet of throat lozenges, and found herself standing next to a man whose suntan, knapsack, and dusty clothing made her think he might have been camped out in the desert, and whose inquiry as to the price of a carton of cigarettes—Duoshao g
ian? which was “How much?” in Chinese—came out sounding a lot like Combien?

  “Excuse me,” she said. “Are you Mr. Bouchard?”

  He turned around to face her. He was a middle-aged man with a big torso mounted on skinny, sticklike legs. He had a bushy black beard, the hawk nose that was typical of the French, and a stiff mat of black hair combed straight forward in the style of a Roman charioteer.

  “Oui, yes,” he replied. “I am.” He looked woefully unhappy. His mouth was turned down at the corners, and his eyebrows drooped at the outer edges, giving his face a sad expression.

  Charlotte felt a little sorry for a paleontologist who was so bad at finding fossils that he had to resort to poaching on his colleagues’ territory. “My name is Charlotte Graham,” she said, extending her hand.

  “I recognize you from your films,” he said.

  “I’m interested in learning more about the circumstances of Mr. Fiske’s death. I know that you’ve been camped nearby. I wonder if I could ask you a few questions about the events of that evening?”

  Charlotte could see his confusion. Why on earth was an American movie star asking him questions about the death of a rival paleontologist? Or maybe his confusion was due to the fact that he didn’t understand English.

  “I’m a friend of the family’s,” she explained, improvising as she went along. “They’re not satisfied with the investigation that’s being conducted by the local authorities. Since I happened to be here anyway on an art tour”—she gestured vaguely at the cliff—“they asked me to look into his death.”

  Her lie sounded believable, even to her. She decided she would use it again if the need arose.

  “Ah, oui,” he said, “I understand.”

  He did speak English.

  After paying for the cigarettes, he put them away in his knapsack. “I understand that it was you who discovered the body,” he said. “Therefore, you are probably better able to answer the family’s questions than I. But”—he threw up his hands—“what would you like to know?”

  “How long have you been camped in the desert?”

  “Since last Saturday. I’ve actually been camped in the desert for nearly two weeks, but my camp was originally farther to the south. Of course, I have a room here as well, where I shower. I eat most of my meals here too, although I sometimes eat out at my camp.”

  “Why did you move your camp?”

  “There weren’t any fossils where I first made my camp.”

  “And Mr. Fiske? How long had he been camped there?”

  “A couple of days longer. I’m not sure exactly. I think he set up his camp the Thursday before.”

  In other words, Charlotte thought, Bouchard had moved his camp as soon as he found out that Larry had discovered fossils at his site. He was a claim jumper, just as Bert had said. “Did you ever talk with him?”

  “No. We weren’t friends.”

  “But you were part of the same expedition.”

  He shrugged.

  “Why weren’t you friends?”

  “Professional conflicts. I’d rather not get into it.”

  “Of course,” said Charlotte, sympathetically. Then she plowed ahead, deciding to get right to the point: “If you weren’t friends, then you must not have been aware that he had made a big discovery.”

  “He was always claiming to have made big discoveries,” said Bouchard with a dismissive wave of his hand.

  “This time he really did make a big discovery. He found a nearly complete T. rex skeleton. On the day before he died.”

  For a few seconds, Bouchard stared at her, his jaw hanging limp.

  Charlotte didn’t know how to take his reaction. It could have been the equivalent of Lisa’s “holy shit,” or it could have been the reaction of someone who has just realized that his plan to claim Larry’s discovery as his own has been foiled. “How do you know he found a T. rex?” he asked.

  If she really had been conducting an investigation for the family, it wouldn’t have been out of place for her to be aware of Larry’s find: it would have been recorded in his field diary. Bouchard shouldn’t have been surprised that she knew about it—unless he was the one who had removed the missing page.

  “I saw it,” she replied. She explained about the missing page, and how she and Lisa had figured out the location of the find from the master map. As she spoke, a question arose in her mind. If the person who had ripped the page out of the field diary wanted to destroy evidence of the find, why hadn’t he taken the master map as well? He might not have known of its existence, but she doubted that would be the case for someone like Bert or Dogie, who had worked closely with Larry in the past. It was far more likely to have been overlooked by someone like Bouchard whose field technique was sloppy to begin with, and who probably didn’t go to the trouble to make maps himself.

  Bouchard listened, the face behind his bushy black beard a blank.

  “Do you have any idea who removed the page from his field log?” She was accusing him, and he knew it. She knew he would answer no, but she wanted to get a sense of whether or not he was lying. As an actor herself, she was pretty good at discerning when people weren’t telling the truth.

  “No,” said Bouchard, his bronzed brow wrinkling in a phony frown. “I don’t. Is that all for today?” He turned to walk away. “I have work to do.” He was clearly irritated at the accusatory nature of her questions.

  “One more question,” she said.

  He turned back impatiently.

  “Were you at your camp on the night Mr. Fiske was murdered?”

  “Yes, I was,” he said. “But I didn’t kill him, if that’s what you’re implying. And I think I’ve had enough of your questions,” he added sharply.

  “I wasn’t implying anything,” she said. “I just wanted to know if you saw or heard anything unusual that night.”

  “Nothing. I was asleep. I went to bed early, at around eight. I already went through all of this with the security police. I didn’t see anything until you arrived the next morning. Then I saw the police, and I concluded that something had happened. Why don’t you speak with Fiske’s help? If anyone saw anything, it would be they.”

  “I intend to,” she replied. “How about early the next morning?” she asked, remembering how fresh the blood had smelled.

  “I thought he was murdered during the night.”

  “We don’t know for sure. It might have been early the next morning.”

  “I did see somebody early the next morning.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Dogie O’Dea.”

  8

  Bouchard said he had seen Dogie heading toward Larry’s camp about seven-thirty, which was at dawn here. When Charlotte asked him what he had been doing at that hour, he had replied, “Je pissais.” He didn’t know if Dogie had actually made it to the camp, he said; he had gone back to bed. Nor had he told the police about seeing Dogie. It had been his impression from what the police had told him that Larry had been murdered during the night. Therefore, he didn’t think the fact that he had seen Dogie early that morning was relevant.

  Charlotte’s chat with him left her confused. She suspected it was he who had ripped the page out of Larry’s field diary, which would point to his being the murderer. And if he had already been in the area for almost two weeks, he would have had ample time to dig up a beggar on whom to plant Larry’s shortwave radio. But if he was the murderer, why hadn’t he told the police about seeing Dogie? It was a stupid murderer indeed who didn’t take advantage of every opportunity to pin the crime on somebody else. Maybe he’d figured it wasn’t necessary: if he had stolen the shortwave radio with the intention of framing Feng, he would have been secure in the knowledge that everything was taken care of—until Charlotte came along with her news that the Fiske family wasn’t buying the police’s explanation, that is. Maybe he had only cooked up the story about seeing Dogie when he realized that his plot wasn’t going to work. She had another question as well. If Bouchard had mur
dered Larry with the intention of claiming Larry’s discovery as his own, how had he known that Larry hadn’t already told someone about his find? Larry might have told them all about it at the party that evening. Then again, Bouchard might not even have known that Larry had gone to the party. Larry had arrived at the dining hall at around eight-thirty. If what Bouchard said was true, he was already in bed by then. On the other hand, maybe there was another explanation altogether. Maybe Bouchard had simply taken advantage of the fact that Larry had been murdered to find out what it was that he had discovered.

  She tried to picture the scenario in her mind. After a week of fossil hunting, Bouchard isn’t finding anything. But he learns—perhaps after a little reconnaissance—that his rival is finding fossils galore at another site. He moves his camp, and is doing very well. But perhaps he’s wondering, What’s Fiske got that I haven’t? Though Bouchard claimed that he and Larry didn’t talk, maybe he was lying. Maybe Larry said or did something to tip Bouchard off that he’d made a big find. Then comes the morning of their discovery of the body: from his tent, Bouchard sees their party arrive. Then he sees them go, and the police arrive. He wonders what’s up. He wanders across the DMZ, and is told by the police that Larry has been killed. The body’s removed, and for a short while, the camp is left unguarded. Or, if it is guarded, the guard is inattentive. Taking advantage of the unexpected opportunity, Bouchard searches Larry’s work tent, discovers the field diary, and tears out the previous day’s page. Maybe he doesn’t intend to claim Larry’s discovery as his own, at first. Maybe he just wants to find out what it was that had made Larry so proud of himself. But when he realizes the significance of Larry’s find, the thought dawns on him that this is his chance to make it big.

  That was one scenario, anyway.

  There was also another. As much as she wanted to keep it from doing so, it insisted on taking form in her mind: that of a bandy-legged former cowboy wearing a tan Stetson—a pissant walking around with a potato chip on its head—stealing out into the desert in the pale dawn light to murder his colleague. Bouchard had said he recognized Dogie by his hat. There was a motive too: always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Though it was Dogie who had the nose for fossils, it was Bert who had the credentials, Bert who had the position, Bert who got the credit, Bert who was the boss. But a find like the T. rex was too big for its discoverer to be given second billing. Bert and Dogie were like Siamese twins. What had Dogie been doing out in the desert at seven-thirty in the morning without his pardner? Unless it was to murder Larry.