“Good morning, Mrs. Chance,” Chase said with customary politeness. Cold air, heavy with the scents of lavender and menthol blew into his face.
“Hello,” Ansel replied.
Permelia shifted her green, hawk-eyed gaze right on her. “There’s my girl. You’ve always had the most beautiful skin. I can see the bronze blush of native blood in you so clearly in the light. My grandparents were Oklahoma Cherokee, you know. How I wish I had more of those earthy tones. I take after my English half. I’m as pasty as Elmer’s glue.”
“ Thank you,” she said before glancing at her father for rescue.
Chase jumped in with both spurs.“What can I do for you?”
Permelia pulled the plastic-tipped stub from her lips. “I want to buy some Angus. Thought I’d spike the ranch gene pool with Scottish blood and get some black baldys. Got bulls for sale?”
“Well, let me think. How many head you need?” he asked with a poker face.
“At least two, and I want randy ones with balls of steel. My cows will kick a pilgrim stud chin-up toward the moon if he’s not as testy as my brush-splitters.”
“I reckon I could part with a couple bulls if the price is right.”
Permelia cast a sideway glance. “You must be doing better than most ranchers around here, Chase, if you don’t need to thin the herd. I know Jim Ruley out to Sidney is practically giving his Angus away because of the drought, but I’m hankering to give you my business. You’re closer, and you treat your stock like kin.” She fixed him with a friendly stare.
Chase swallowed. “I’ll give you a fair price, Mrs. Chance. I can show you two sporting bulls right now. We can go up to the corrals and talk business if you like.”
“That’s more like it. I’ll follow you up.” Permelia eyeballed Ansel. “And I’m commissioning you to draw a cover for my book. I’m writing a tell-all monograph about the history of my family and the men I’ve known called Montana Chaps. I’ve seen your pictures, and they’ve got punch. Just what I’m looking for in my cover art.”
Both flattered and confounded, Ansel said, “Mrs. Chance, I’m a paleoartist. I draw pictures of prehistoric life forms not portraits or contemporary subjects. I couldn’t do your book cover justice, though I appreciate you asking me.”
Permelia emitted a throaty laugh. “That’s why I want you. My family is no stranger to the field of fossil hunting. Very few people know it, but my grandfather worked with Barnum Brown in the early eighteen-hundreds.”
“Your grandfather knew Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History?”
Brown was no less than the man who discovered the first reasonably complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton in the Cretaceous fossil beds of Hell Creek and who made the “Tyrant Lizard King” the most popular dinosaur of all time.
“That’s the fella, all right. And my third husband, Elam, bought a quarry once. You wouldn’t believe the bones, photos, and papers I have at the ranch. It’s a big portion of the book. Sure would appreciate you helping me to sort out all that old stuff, too,” Permelia coaxed.
“Barnum Brown,” Ansel repeated. “I can’t believe it.”
Permelia gave Ansel a cagey smile, then reached into a jumper pocket and pulled out a pink business card clutched between rosy fingernails. “Give me a call, and we’ll talk wampum.” She spied Chase. “Let’s go. Belle Starr and I aren’t getting any younger.”
The window buzzed up, and the skinny dachshund resumed barking and leaping across the pink leather seat.
Chase grinned from ear to ear. “Don’t feel bad. She ambushed you.”
“Me? She had you rolled and hog-tied in under fifteen seconds.”
“We both got stuck and didn’t feel the needle,” Chase agreed with a chuckle. “You coming to the corral?”
“No way. I’m heading home,” Ansel replied, thinking of her double-wide trailer outside the town of Big Toe. “I’ve got drawings to work on. Oh, give Chunky a special treat when you get back. He earned it today.” She kissed her father just as Permelia gunned the car’s engine, spewing fumes as incentive to hurry.
“All right, Sarcee,” he said, using her middle name.
Ansel took off her Stetson and hopped into the cab of her relatively new blue pickup. The windows were open, but the interior was stifling. She placed her hat on the seat and tossed the pink business card on the dash. She had been ambushed, but the idea of hearing about Barnum Brown and his expeditions was enticing. She rolled up the windows and turned over the motor, setting the air conditioning on the highest notch.
Her father pulled the truck and trailer out onto the road and moved past Parmelia’s luxury sedan. In a moment, the vehicles picked up speed and rushed toward the paddocks where the sale stock was bedded down. Permelia’s neon card below the windshield caught Angel’s eye again, and she picked it up.
The flowing black script was large and simple - Parmelia Reading Chance. Diamond Tail Ranch. Quality Herefords. No address. No phone. What Permelia lacked with an advertising spiel, she more than made up for with her devil’s gift for gab, Ansel assessed.
Still those romantic fantasies of stark Badlands bluffs and never-before seen dinosaur bones filled her head with gossamer visions. Her nostalgic daydreams about Hell Creek evaporated, however, when the cell phone setting on the center console rang.
“Hello.”
“Ansel, where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you for over thirty minutes.”
“Cam?” she asked, recognizing the whiny voice of Doctor Cameron Bieselmore.
“Come to the museum.”
“What?”
“Come-to-the-museum,” he repeated in a stilted tone as if giving orders to an ADD patient.
“No,” she bristled. “I’m at the ranch. I’ve just watered four-hundred cows and dragged another out of the mud. You’re the museum director. It’s your problem, whatever it is.”
She fully expected Bieselmore to continue arguing. Nothing. Dead air.
“Cam, are you still there?”
Bieselmore’s frantic voice burst through the receiver and nearly blew out her eardrum. “I’ve called the police. Your Allosaurus killed somebody.”
Chapter 3
“When you have a talent of any kind, use it, take care of it, guard it.”
Sauk
Ansel slowed the truck along Barnum Brown Road. It seemed prophetic that she was making her mad dash to what might be a crime scene on a street named in honor of the same fossil hunter that Permelia had mentioned only an hour before.
During the drive, she tried to make sense of what Bieselmore had said before hanging up. How could her Allosaurus kill someone?
She supposed the life-sized model could topple and crush a person, but the dinosaur had been securely anchored into the ground with tornado-resistant, steel cables and concrete plugs. The mooring method had complied with all construction codes required by the Big Toe Building and Planning Department and had passed muster with the town council.
Ansel gunned through the chain link entranceway to find the tiny museum parking lot brimming over with patrol cars, a fire truck, plus other assorted vans and vehicles involved with the messy business of death. She parallel parked against the fencing, grabbed her keys and Stetson, and jumped out. No one was in sight, but Bieselmore’s black Explorer was next to a twenty-one foot, fiberglass replica of a rare Torosaurus dinosaur. Maybe she could find him.
The museum, which was a remodeled two-story farmhouse, also looked deserted. She passed a large wooden sign posted on the grass and went up the steps. A tug on the white steel door revealed that the museum was locked. Undaunted, Ansel proceeded down the sidewalk toward the left corner of the building.
The rear gate was open, and she saw a phalanx of people about three-hundred feet away. They stood on the parched grassland next to a twisted curve of the Redwater River where a series of meandering fossil tracks had been imprinted on sandstone by several different dinosaur species. She could also see the upright Allosaurus
model and relief washed over her.
Ansel hurried through the gate and down a long board walkway ending near the slow-moving waters of the tributary. Once she stepped off the planking, she treaded carefully. Her boots made loud crunching sounds on the dead grass, and inch-long, migratory grasshoppers scuttled from her path. It was too damn hot to fly.
No one paid attention as she joined the group gathered a good ways behind her Allosaurus. Ansel located Bieselmore right away. He stood beside two burley Big Toe policemen and wore his usual black pants and shirt ensemble. His hairless, baby-pink head sweated liquid bee bees beneath blistering rays of sunshine.
Ansel took in the county forensics team wearing white smocks or black I.D. tee-shirts. One tech clicked off a volley of 35MM camera shots. Another videotaped the area from every angle. Her gaze raked the ground. Where was the body? All she saw were harried people and two cops arguing in loud voices. Luckily, she knew both men personally.
“First, I want this area roped off. No one goes near the dinosaur, the truck or the saw until I say so,” said Chief Flynn.
“You can lay the tape, Cullen, but this is Bureau of Land Management land,” Lieutenant Reid Dorbandt replied, facing the wiry, red-haired officer. “Neither one of us has jurisdiction.”
Ansel stared at Dorbandt. He was wearing his usual nappy investigative attire: dark gray suit, pale gray shirt, gray-striped tie, shiny black half boots. A sixteen year veteran of the Lacrosse County Sheriff’s homicide division, he was very trim and physically fit for a man in his early thirties.
“Oh, that’s just what we need,” Flynn said beneath the shade of his ten-gallon hat. “Government paper-pushers underfoot. We tell them about this too soon, and we’ll be off the case by noon. This property is within city limits, and the Big Toe town council leases this land. That makes this fossil stealing business my business.”
Dorbandt’s neatly parted, short brown hair framed a tanned, cowboy-rugged face with a square chin and long jaw line. He appeared calm and stoic, but Ansel saw how his lean, tense body language radiated a cop’s distinctive brand of impatience as he tried to deal courteously with Flynn.
“The crime scene is deteriorating by the minute, and we can’t touch it until the BLM says so. You’re the responding officer. You should make the call. I’ve got to call Bucky and let him know about this, too,” Dorbandt insisted.
Flynn shook his head and shuffled his feet. Bucky Combs was the elected Sheriff and the Coroner. Ultimately he would decide the cause of this unattended death after he completed the autopsy. Combs would be another potent ingredient added to this nightmare, bureaucratic mix.
“Play your cards right,” Dorbandt continued, “and the BLM might not revoke the council’s lease. Feds don’t like sloppy security procedures, especially when their national treasures are threatened,” he said, sweeping his hand toward the river.”
Ansel looked there, too, but saw only the hulking span of the dinosaur’s rear end. She had constructed the entire beast with cast rubber skin pieces placed over a heavy, Fiberglass-frame body, then carefully airbrushed it with acrylic paints to resemble brown, tan, and black skin pigments. Where was the body? She moved sideways several yards, facing the sculpture from another angle.
Something large and black hung from the Allosaurus’ three-foot-long, gaping mouth. It looked like a huge chunk of wrinkled, black wadding or burnt wood. For a moment, the surreal tableau disconcerted her. It was if time had reversed, and she was standing in the late Jurassic era observing a giant reptile as it carried a piece of carrion foraged from the riverbed. The truth was more horrible.
Bile rose in Ansel’s throat. An incinerated corpse. The cadaver rested sideways across the reptile’s burned pink tongue and had no recognizable human features. There was a head-like lump at one end, dangling charred arms and legs, and a rigoristic spine arched in limp defeat. A few tattered strips of scorched clothing flapped like banners marking a holocaust.
How in God’s name had it gotten up there?
Flynn’s snort of frustration dragged Ansel’s attention away. He erased a line of sweat from his sunburnt forehead with a nail-bitten hand. Everything about Flynn, his straight-as-a-plumb-line backbone, squared shoulders, and straddling, two-footed stance relayed his bulldog intention to stand his ground about pursuing the case no matter what the protocols.
Elected as Chief for three successive two-year terms in a row, he was a stubborn Irishman who could trace his ancestors back to Derrylea, but who always presented himself as a level-headed and reliable policeman. Cullen Flynn was also one of her father’s best fishing buddies when it came to catching paddlefish out of the Fort Peck Reservoir.
Flynn gestured toward a patrolman. “Dobie, radio Alma at the office and tell her to notify the BLM station about the body. Don’t say anything about the fossils. And get Doc Tweedy. The Feds are still going to need the medical examiner.”
Dobie, a young man of ample stature shrink-wrapped in a blue and white uniform, nodded. “On it,” he answered. The paraphernalia on his Sam Browne belt jangled like alarm bells.
Flynn shot a glance at the Fire Chief. “Frank, you better stay. We need a ladder for the body.”
When she could bare to look no more at the corpse, Ansel scrutinized the rest of the scene. A mass of burnt and twisted metal rested on the ledge in front of the Allosaurus. Smaller charred debris peppered the rocky ground. An orange toolbox sat abandoned on the outcropping, too.
Farther into the grass, a badly rusted 4X4 Ranger faced the river. The tail gate was open, and a wooden ramp was propped against the ground. Even beneath the patina of range dust that covered it, Ansel could see it lacked a license tag.
Ansel moved forward sideways a bit and tapped Bieselmore lightly on the shoulder. The director’s squinty eyes widened with surprise. She held a finger to her lips and motioned him away from the knot of crime scene personnel.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Bieselmore whispered. “This is disastrous.”
“How did it happen, Cam?”
“I arrived at the museum as usual and walked down to the riverbed to check the fossils before unlocking the museum. I found everything just like this; the truck, the machine, and that man in the dinosaur’s mouth. I ran straight to the museum and called you, but you didn’t answer so I had to call the police. They just arrived.”
“Flynn mentioned fossil theft. Are the footprints all right?”
Bieselmore’s paunch jiggled as he shuddered. “Yes. Thank heavens. The vandal tried to cut out a carnosaur track with a concrete saw, but the machine exploded. The blast put him up there. Just desserts I say, but do you realize what this is going to do to the museum’s reputation? We’ll be known as a killing ground. Tourists will avoid us like the plague. Even if Land Management doesn’t pull the plug on this place, we’re screwed.”
“Ms. Phoenix, what are you doing here?”
Ansel flinched. Dorbandt. They had met fourteen months ago during the homicide investigations of two Pangaea Society members. Both Bieselmore and she still belonged to the paleontology organization but at the time, she’d been the president elect. Her life had been threatened by a psychotic killer, and Dorbandt had handled the case. Since then, they had maintained a loose, personal friendship which waxed and waned as their busy lives crossed paths.
Ansel gave Bieselmore a silencing look and turned to stare into the detective’s vibrant blue eyes.
“Hello, Reid. Haven’t seen you for about three months. Never thought we’d be meeting under these circumstances.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I came to get some Pangaea Society files,” she lied, though Bieselmore did keep the society records in his museum office.
“Yes, that’s right,” Bieselmore replied. “We’re organizing a state conference and Ansel’s volunteered to make the contact calls.”
“Uh, huh.” Dorbandt glared at the director suspiciously, then gently grabbed Ansel’s right elbow with his left hand. “
Excuse us, Doctor Bieselmore, but stick around. I want to ask you some questions.”
Ansel didn’t protest Dorbandt’s touch as he steered her toward the walkway. Little tingles of pleasure had coursed up her bare arm. Though Dorbandt and she had never crossed the line between friends and more than friends, sometimes the cop just set her hormones slipping loose like a fly on ice. Stop it. You’ve got to use this opportunity to pump him for info.
“Reid, tell me what’s going on. Do you know who that dead person is? Was he after anything besides the fossil tracks?”
“No questions,” he ordered. “You’re leaving.”
“I have a right to know. My Allosaurus has a body clamped between its teeth.”
“And this is my case.”
“Really? Chief Flynn seems to think it’s his investigation. Maybe he’ll talk to me.”
Dorbandt bucked to a stop. “Don’t do it,” he warned.
“Do what?”
“Get involved.” He placed a hand on the small of her back and pushed. “This isn’t some footnote on the Big Toe police blotter. This is big league. Don’t play sleuth.”
“I’m just saying that I need some basic information.”
His cool sapphire eyes turned icy. “It’s what you don’t say that worries me. Can you say Federal Antiquities Act? That’s what we’re dealing with. The poaching of federally protected fossils. Getting caught on the wrong side of BLM policy is a felony.”
Ansel smiled. “I know all about the Federal Antiquities Act. It was established in 1906 and it reserves all rights to objects on land held in trust under the ownership of the United States. It also mandates that these objects be excavated for the benefit of recognized scientific or educational institutions who will retain their permanent preservation in public places. In other words, since a fossil is considered an antiquity, you can’t remove any fossils from land owned or controlled by the U.S. without a permit.”
“Bingo. And the museum sets on property held in trust by the government.”
“I know that, too.”
Carnosaur Crimes Page 2