by Jeff Carson
Shumway coughed. “Yeah. I know. But we don’t want to have him drive over this. Shit.”
Boydell was standing next to his truck now, staring at them. His eyes were red, his cheeks wet.
“Mr. Boydell,” Wolf said walking toward him, “I’m afraid it’s exactly what it looks like here.”
Boydell sagged and closed his eyes. “My God.”
Wolf stopped in front of him and hooked his thumbs in his jeans pockets. “I’m sorry, Bradley. We need to get you back to your quarters. This is a crime scene now and we need to restrict access to law enforcement only. I know you understand.”
Boydell opened his eyes. “Is this why you asked about the Converse shoes? Because I saw those shoe prints. Those are the same as you found in Rocky Points, aren’t’ they?”
Wolf drew his mouth in a line, but said nothing.
Boydell looked at Shumway. “Was this Steven?”
Wolf turned and eyed Shumway.
“Uh … listen, Bradley.” He put his hands on his hips and studied the camp. “I tell you what, let’s walk it back to your quarters. We’ll need to keep this road right here as pristine as possible for evidence gathering.” He raised his hands and dropped them. “I’ll walk you back.”
Boydell waved it away and turned. “I can walk myself.”
“No, Bradley, I can—”
Boydell turned around with raised eyebrows. “Sheriff, I said I can walk myself, and I’ll walk myself. You stay here and do your job, and figure out who did this.”
“Mr. Boydell,” Wolf said.
“What?”
“What were you doing Saturday night?”
Boydell stared at him with peaked eyebrows. “What? Me?”
Wolf nodded.
“I was in my quarters. You can ask Megan and Phil.” He looked at Shumway with a pleading look.
“Okay, thanks Bradley,” Shumway said. “You know we have to cover every base, right?”
“I was up at my quarters.”
Wolf nodded. “Okay.”
Boydell gave Wolf a final resentful look and turned around. He opened his truck door and dropped his car key inside on the seat. “In case you need it.” Then he slammed it and walked up the road and disappeared over the top.
Shumway shook his head. “What the hell was that?”
“And what were you doing Saturday night?” Wolf asked.
Shumway stared long at Wolf. “Are you serious?”
“I am. What were you doing?”
Shumway shook his head.
Wolf held his gaze. “Just covering every base.”
“You’re runnin’ the wrong direction around the bases, Detective.”
“Am I? You have motive, just like the rest of the people I’m meeting.”
“Motive? What motive do I have?”
“That land used to be yours. I don’t know, maybe you’ve been resentful of their find all along, wishing you still had the land, so you could make all that money with a fossil sale. Maybe you know a lot more about fossil trade than you’re leading on. Maybe you know exactly where that second skeleton came from—somewhere on your family’s land.
“Megan told me you lost the land. Maybe she was telling the truth. Is she? Which one of you is lying about that? Did you and your brother sell it? Or did you lose it?”
They stared at one another for a few seconds, and then Shumway stormed away toward his truck.
Shumway opened his door and bent inside, searching the floorboards for something. He looked in the side pocket on his door, then picked a piece of paper out and brandished it at Wolf.
“Here.” Shumway walked over and handed it to him.
It was a credit card receipt for a Chuck’s Grill and Tavern.
“Look at the address.”
Wolf did. It said 1823 Garland Street, Windfield Colorado.
“And look at the time. The date.”
10:29 pm. Saturday, August 11th.
Wolf shrugged. “So your credit card was at Chuck’s Grill Saturday night. Doesn’t mean you were.”
Shumway put his hands on his hips. “Okay. Fine.” He walked back to his truck and leaned inside. “What does that total say on there?”
“What?”
“The total price after tip?”
Wolf was already convinced now. The man was telling the truth and all it would have taken to verify it was a trip to Chuck’s Grill and Tavern, but he went along with Shumway anyway. “Forty eight dollars.”
Shumway scribbled something on a piece of paper, ripped it out of a notebook and walked back to Wolf.
“Let’s do a little handwriting check, shall we?” Shumway said.
He held the piece of paper next to the receipt. It was the number 48 with two 0’s after it and a line underneath. The handwriting was identical, along with the little line underneath the zeros, and it was such terrible chicken scratch that there was little doubt they were both Shumway’s hand.
“So that puts me at the bar, right? If you want we can go in there and ask around.”
Wolf gave him back the receipt. “Okay. I believe you.”
Wolf rubbed his temples and walked toward the ring of scorched earth Levi used as a fire pit. There was a patch of dry grass beyond it smattered with blood.
The spatter was barely visible in the oblique light, but it was there, telling a story. Wolf pictured the killer hauling up and driving the blade down, then repeating, causing long streaks.
This spot looked to be where Levi had sustained most of his wounds. Probably where Levi had been felled initially by a knockout blow to the face and then where he’d been stabbed a dozen or more times.
Closing his eyes and erasing the movie playing in his mind, he turned to the final warm rays of the sun. Hills and jutting rocks cast shadows that painted streaks through the air and darkened the landscape—the western faces gleaming, the opposite sides already lost in the advancing night.
“This is where he was killed.”
Shumway walked up next to him.
“We’re missing something. Something big.”
“Who killed these people? Yeah, no shit.”
Wolf shook his head and walked to the edge of the road. “Look at this. The footprints go off the edge of the road here, then come back up the hill …”
“Yeah, you said that earlier. So what?” Shumway said.
“If it was Steven, wouldn’t there be a set of tracks from his camp up to this camp and back?”
“Not if he drove up here, got out and murdered him, then put Levi down there and hiked back up to his truck.”
Wolf nodded. “In the process leaving a shit-pot of evidence, once again. Only this time it literally points in the direction of his own camp.”
“Maybe he was just plain dumb about the shoe prints.”
Wolf said nothing.
“I mean, you can’t be in a right state of mind to be killing people like this. Maybe he just let the shoeprints slip.”
“Both of them.” Wolf looked at Shumway. “There were two sets of footprints at the scene in Rocky Points. Only one set here.”
“Not following you.”
“I’m just saying.” Wolf folded his arms and stared down at Steven’s tent and truck sitting in the darkened valley. “The pit this morning down at Dig Two—they had a tarp shading the pit, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And would you consider that covered up? I mean, we walked right up to the edge of the pit and looked inside, right?”
“Yeah?”
“And what about that plaster in the back of Steven’s truck?”
“What about it?”
“My deputies said they found the bones in that burned truck encased in plaster. And there’s chunks of plaster sitting in the back of Steven’s truck.”
Wolf walked away toward his truck.
“Where are you going?”
“Down to Dig Two.”
“What? What about this crime scene?”
“We’re going to find he wa
s killed with a shovel. The shovel’s going to be missing, and the only evidence worth anything will be those shoe prints. I’m done with this crime scene.”
Chapter 28
Wolf left Shumway shaking his head in the side view mirror and drove up the road and onto the plateau.
As he twisted on his headlights, the straight two-track lit up. Then he clicked on his brights and the tents and tarps of Dig One reflected back at him.
Karen Orpia and Dr. Mathis stood up from their camp chairs and moved steadily toward the road to intercept Wolf as he passed.
Slowing to a halt, Wolf leaned an elbow out his window.
“Hello, Detective,” Dr. Mathis said. The doctor wore a headlamp that shone straight into Wolf’s eyes.
“Could you point that down?” Wolf asked.
“Oh yes. Sorry.” He pointed the beam down. “What’s going on up there?”
Wolf sat for a moment in silence, then asked, “When exactly was the last time you two saw Levi?”
They looked at one another.
“Shit, is that why you’re there? He still hasn’t shown up?” Karen leaned her head on Dr. Mathis shoulder.
“Is that true?” Dr. Mathis asked.
Wolf nodded. “Can you please answer the question?”
“Uh, I guess it must have been … heck I hardly know what day it is when we’re out here.”
“It’s Monday,” Karen said. “We saw him Saturday. Saturday morning he came in and had coffee with us, then went back to his camp and we haven’t seen him since.”
Dr. Mathis nodded, his beam of light bouncing up and down. “Yes. And he never mentioned where he was going that day. Not once. Never even said he was going hiking.”
Wolf nodded. “Can I ask you two for a favor?”
They nodded.
“Can you two come down with me to Dig Two? I have some questions I need answered and the Dig Two team is no longer there.”
Dr. Mathis’s light beam twisted to Karen. She had her eyebrows raised high.
In unison, they said, “Yeah.”
Wolf parked at the main camp of Dig Two and kept the headlights on. They got out and walked through the swirling dust in the beams of light toward the tents.
“Where are they?” Karen asked quietly.
Wolf flipped on his flashlight beam. “They’re in jail at the moment.”
“What?” Dr. Mathis asked. “You’re kidding, right? They’re your murder suspects?”
Wolf said nothing as he led them between the tents and through the white shade tent, which still had three half-eaten sandwiches on plates underneath it, plus a few dozen insects.
“Shit,” Karen said, focusing her beam on a hairy spider walking on a white piece of bread.
Jet sniffed close and the spider raised its front legs.
“Jet, no.” Wolf said on the way by.
Jet whined and followed.
“Where are you taking us?” Dr. Mathis asked. “To the pit I hope.”
Wolf stepped to the open pit and stopped.
Dr. Mathis had beaten him there and had all but skidded to a stop, kicking some dirt into the hole.
“My heck.” Dr. Mathis swept his headlamp beam up and down the length of the spine of the fossilized skeleton. “My ... heck …”
The doctor probed the bones with his headlamp beam, with clear methodical purpose, inhaling sharply and staring at a leg bone, then turning and studying the claws, then gasping while he stared at the skull.
“This is the most complete Allosaurus specimen I’ve ever seen. And the condition … it’s spectacular. Female … You can tell by the pelvic structure and the lacrimal crest.”
Karen was gripping Dr. Mathis arm at the edge of the great pit, following the beam of light as it took in every detail.
“What a bunch of assholes keeping this secret,” Karen said. “What the hell?”
“Look at the skull,” Dr. Mathis said. “It’s larger than Omega by at least ten centimeters. Look at the quality of fossilization.”
“What’s Omega?” Wolf asked.
“Oh, the replica in the Visitor’s Center,” Karen said.
Wolf put his hands on his hips. “How do you go about finding a skeleton like this? Do you use that GPR you were talking about earlier today and search a grid pattern or something?”
Dr. Mathis laughed. “A lot of people think exactly what you just said—that in this day and age we can head out into the wilds of Colorado, or Utah, or Siberia, or Australia with our ground penetrating radar and just start scanning until we find the mother lode, like the one we’re looking at right now. Sure, that is the hope one day. In fact there are some people working on scanning by aircraft … but that technology is farther in the future than we’d like, and in reality finding a fossil is akin to the old time gold prospectors looking for a vein of gold.
“Firstly, we seek out a place where known dinosaur fossils have been found. Like say, Dinosaur National Monument and surrounding areas. Check. Secondly, we seek out places where erosion is taking place year round, doing the unearthing of the bones for us.” Dr. Mathis twisted with his arms out. “This dry riverbed in this ancient valley for instance. Check. Thirdly, we walk up and down the bottom of the valley with our foreheads inches from the ground searching for tiny fragments of fossilized bone. When we find it, we move up stream, looking for larger chunks. When the fossils peter out to nothing, we know we’ve passed the potential mother lode and move our way up the sides of the hills and look for the larger bones.
“More often than not we find absolutely nothing. Sometimes we find a large fossil specimen, say a leg bone or arm bone, or rib, and the rest of the skeleton sat in the wrong material for millions of years and simply decayed away into nothing.
“But in the rarest of cases we find something as magnificent as this. The animal has died, and before scavengers were able to devour him the animal was buried rapidly, say by a mud or landslide event. Perhaps a catastrophic event that killed the animal in the first place. Then over thousands of years the organic material decomposed, the minerals seeped in to replace the decomposing bone, and now here we are. We’re left with rock in the shape of the original bones. And in this case, rock curved and hardened into a magnificent three dimensional picture of exactly how the animal existed underneath his skin at that very moment of death almost a hundred million years ago.”
Dr. Mathis’s chest heaved.
Wolf frowned. “And that’s what they did? They found a piece of a bone, followed the other pieces up stream, came a few yards up this hill and excavated this?”
Dr. Mathis nodded and wrapped both hands around a huge bone. “Green liked to tell anyone who’d listen. They found a claw, then some smaller fragments, then came up on a femur sticking out of the ground. And voila.”
“A femur, like that bone you’re grabbing in your hand right now?” Wolf asked, pretty sure he could recognize a femur.
Dr. Mathis froze for a few seconds then let go, like he realized he was just holding a hunk of plutonium.
“And how about that other bone right next to it,” Wolf asked.
Dr. Mathis stood up. “What in the heck? What’s going on?” The man twisted in a circle. His light swiveled wildly in the hole.
Wolf nodded. “Which leads me to my next question. What are the odds of pulling out two complete fossil specimens like this out of the same hole?”
Chapter 29
“Two skeletons?” Karen asked with a chuckle. “Not likely at all.”
Dr. Mathis shined his light on Wolf and held up a finger. “But hold on. However ridiculously rare it would be to find something like that, Detective Wolf’s question is actually not far off the mark of ... hmmm.”
“What? No way,” Karen said. “What are you talking about?”
“Karen,” Dr. Mathis nodded at her, “remember the first time we saw the progress of this dig? It was two years ago. We’d been here for two months, flipping dust off partial caudal vertebrae, and here comes Green and his stu
dents finding an Allosaurus femur poking out of the ground. And less than a mile away from us.”
Karen said nothing.
“It was a femur, do you remember?”
Karen shook her head, and then she nodded. “Yeah, okay. It was.”
“Yes, it was. Do you remember the disgust?” Dr. Mathis asked with a chuckle. “The anguish?”
Karen rolled her eyes and wiped her nose. “Whatever.”
“And do you remember the location of it?” Dr. Mathis tilted his head.
Karen started nodding now. “It was right on the surface.”
Dr. Mathis looked at Wolf. “So you’re right, they must have found bones from two dinosaurs. There’s no other explanation. These bones here are all meters below the surface, and I’m looking at two femurs right now, and we saw a femur. Heck, look at the amount of earth they’ve removed. But you asked if they pulled a second, complete skeleton out of this same hole? No. No way. The odds are too astronomical.”
“We found a second skeleton,” Wolf said. “Allosaurus. Female. Thought to be almost eighty percent complete.”
Dr. Mathis stepped toward Wolf. “What do you mean, we found a second skeleton?”
Wolf nodded. “At one of our crime scenes.”
Dr. Mathis looked down. “That’s impossible. Isn’t it?” He went to the edge of the pit and dug a chunk off the side. “Sandy, but very dense. I guess it could be.”
“And now it makes sense why they were hiding the pit for a year and a half,” Karen said. “All this time, they were digging out the top skeleton to get to the bottom one.”
Wolf nodded and kicked a bucket on the ground. “They encased them in field casting and transported the bones out as they excavated them. But how would they hide this kind of thing from your boss? You talked about using ground penetrating radar on your dig up there. Wouldn’t they be able to see a second skeleton underneath it from the beginning readouts?”
Dr. Mathis bent down and picked some more soil off the edge of the hole. “Not necessarily. We do GPR readings for initial funding. This soil is pretty dense, and we use a 1000 MHz antenna for fossil detection. With the second skeleton this low? Could have gone undetected until they found the second one with their bare hands. Or maybe it was … yeah,” he walked to the end of the hole and kept walking into the dark, “this specimen ends here, and there’s another pit to the side of it. This over here must be where the first skeleton was found. So they weren’t on top of one another, they were side by side, this one being a little deeper. They were more overlapping.