by Stuart Gibbs
“I’m not saying he’s right,” Dad went on. “But the case does seem pretty impossible. For the life of me, I can’t imagine how anyone could make off with something that big so far from a road. At night in the middle of a rainstorm to boot.”
“Maybe they didn’t take it all the way to the road,” Summer suggested. “Maybe they only got it halfway and then hid it in the woods somewhere on the ranch for a while. And then they’re going to come back later to get it. Maybe they’re even coming back today!”
“It still would have been incredibly difficult to get the skull halfway,” Dad told her. “And they still would have left footprints at the crime scene.”
Summer started to dispute this, then realized she didn’t have an argument. She closed her mouth again and frowned. “That’s a good point,” she admitted.
A few seconds of silence passed, all of us trying to come up with a way the crime could have been committed, and failing.
“What was that phone call you got about?” Summer asked me suddenly.
I realized she and Xavier had been out by the river when I had explained everything to Dad. “The Barksdales bought an anaconda.”
“An anaconda?” Summer echoed. “Isn’t that illegal?”
“If the Barksdales did it, it must be,” Xavier said. Then he looked to me. “So why’d they call you?”
“It ate their cat,” I said.
Summer burst into laughter. “No way! It ate Griselda?”
“Yes,” I said. “They wanted to know how to do the Heimlich maneuver on it.”
Summer laughed harder. Even Xavier chuckled a bit.
“You think that’s funny?” I asked him, surprised he could find any humor in the death of an animal.
“Sure,” Xavier said.
“You’re not upset about the cat?” Summer asked, between fits of giggles.
“Normally, I would be,” Xavier said. “But Griselda was a menace. Feral cats kill over a billion birds a year in the United States alone—and Griselda was worse than most. I’ll bet she took out a couple hundred a year herself.”
A big gust of wind kicked up. There was a crack like a gunshot and a big, thick branch snapped off an oak tree and dropped into the road in front of us. Dad slammed on the brakes, but even though we were going slowly, the car still skidded on the muddy ground. We slid a few yards forward before coming to a stop right next to the branch, our front bumper just kissing the bark.
Dad heaved a sigh of relief. “That was close. C’mon, kids. We’ll need to drag it off the road.” He opened his door and climbed out.
The rest of us got out with him. The rain had turned the dirt road into a thick slurry. My feet sank so deeply into it that cold mud ran into my shoes, which was an unsettling feeling. Xavier and Summer didn’t seem pleased about it either.
“This is my best pair of sneakers,” Xavier groused. “My mom’s gonna kill me.”
More damp cattle stood by the side of the road, shin-deep in mud, watching us while they chewed their cud.
The branch that lay across the road was eight inches in diameter. If it had fallen a couple seconds later, it might have caved in the roof of our car.
“Have you heard anything from the reptile team at FunJungle yet?” I asked Dad.
He fished his phone from the pocket of his jeans. “Oh yeah. Looks like I missed a message from them. They rounded up some folks to go to the Barksdales’ and check things out.” He tucked the phone away and then added, “They won’t have any legal jurisdiction, though. If the Barksdales don’t want to let them into their house, there won’t be much they can do about it.”
“Maybe the Barksdales will want them to come in,” I suggested. “Maybe, after Griselda, they’ll have realized that it’s dangerous to have an anaconda in the house.”
“That thought process sounds a little too intelligent for the Barksdales.” Summer frowned at the worsening condition of her shoes as she slogged through the mud. “I mean, they were dumb enough to get an anaconda in the first place. Who does that?”
“More people than you’d think,” Dad said. “In fact, there are people whose children have been killed by their pet snakes.”
Xavier, Summer, and I shared a look of horror at that. “No way,” Xavier said.
“Sadly, it’s true.” Dad knelt by the side of the branch and grabbed onto some twigs that protruded from it.
The rest of us followed his lead.
“On my three,” Dad said, then counted, “One… two… three!”
We all heaved as hard as we could. The branch was surprisingly heavy, and it had fallen with enough force to stick fast in the mud. Our feet sank even deeper into the muck until they touched the rocks a few inches down, at which point we finally had enough leverage to move the branch. It held fast for a few moments, then came free so quickly that Xavier and I both stumbled backward and landed on our butts.
Now cold ooze ran over my waistline and into my pants, which was a significantly worse feeling than having it in my shoes.
Xavier yelped in disgust, obviously having felt the same thing, and leaped to his feet. “Ugh! Gross!” he exclaimed. “I’ve got mud in my butt!”
Summer burst into laughter again.
“It’s not funny,” I told her, struggling to my feet.
“Yes, it is,” she informed me.
Now that the branch was free, we could move it to the side of the road, but that still wasn’t easy. It was heavy and unwieldy and difficult to drag through the muck. By the time we got it to the edge of the driveway, we were all smeared with mud.
My hands were coated with it. I knelt to wash them off in a puddle.
Summer joined me. “I hate to say this, but Esquivel might have a point about stealing that skull.”
Xavier looked up from wiping his hands on his pants. “What are you saying? That everyone’s lying about there having been a dinosaur?”
“No.” Summer rubbed her hands feverishly in the murky water. “But it was hard enough moving that branch ten feet just now, and it didn’t weigh anything close to what that skull would have. So how would someone have moved the skull without a team of people?”
“Maybe they did have a team,” Dad said.
I stood up, drying my hands on my pants, which didn’t work very well, as my pants were already quite wet. “You mean everyone from the site stole the skull?”
“No,” Dad replied. “I mean, maybe a group of professionals took it.”
“Professional dinosaur thieves?” Xavier asked, incredulous.
“They exist,” Dad said. “A friend of mine wrote an article about it in National Geographic a while back. Not too long ago, everyone thought that dinosaur skeletons should only be in museums, but over the past few decades, a lot of private collectors have been buying fossils for themselves. That has made the prices skyrocket, which has led to a black market in stolen bones. So now, there are thieves that specialize in fossils. When millions of dollars are at stake, I’ll bet you could easily assemble a whole team of those specialists.”
“But how would they have found out about Minerva if she was a secret?” Summer asked.
“These professionals pay well for information,” Dad answered. “Secrets don’t stay secret for long when money’s on the line.” He picked his way back through the mud toward the car.
The rest of us followed him. Like Xavier, I had cold mud down my pants, which made me shiver as I walked.
Summer paused suddenly. “Even if there was a team of thieves, how could they avoid that?” She pointed at the stretch of driveway in front of the car.
The activity of our moving the branch had churned up all the mud. There were hundreds of deep holes and gouges from our feet, plus two large divots where Xavier and I had landed on our butts. The mud looked like an entire army had trooped through it, rather than only four people.
Summer said, “If we did that just moving a branch, imagine what eight to ten people would do moving a five-hundred-pound skull more than three miles.
It would take days to smooth out all the tracks they’d leave behind. Weeks, maybe.”
“Maybe it was a really big team of people,” Xavier suggested. “Like, ten of them stole the skull, while another ten smoothed out the tracks behind them.” He looked to my father. “Do these gangs of thieves ever get that big?”
“I don’t know,” Dad said. “Maybe. Although it might take a hundred men to smooth out miles of footprints like those.”
We all clambered back in the car, trying our best not to get mud everywhere, but that proved impossible. Both Xavier and I had it all over the seats of our pants, and it was thickly clotted on everyone’s shoes. We were all wet and cold, and despite Dad turning the heat on, the rest of the slow, bumpy ride down the driveway was rather miserable. I was trying to figure out how someone could have moved the skull three and a half miles without leaving a trail of several thousand footprints, but all I could really think about was how nice a warm shower would be.
“Where’d the Barksdales get an anaconda in the first place?” Summer asked suddenly.
“I asked,” I said. “But they wouldn’t tell me. In fact, they got really defensive about it.”
Summer said, “Well, if they got it illegally, then that must mean there’s an unauthorized reptile dealer operating around here.”
“I suppose that makes sense,” my father said thoughtfully. “Although the Barksdales might have simply bought it from someone else who had purchased it illegally. Someone who didn’t realize the snake was going to get so big and was looking for some suckers to pawn it off on.”
“That’d be the Barksdales for sure,” I said.
“Then why would they be so defensive when you asked about where they got the snake?” Summer asked. “There must be an illegal dealer. Who would investigate someone like that?”
“Not Sheriff Esquivel, I hope,” Xavier said.
Dad said, “It ought to be the Department of Fish and Wildlife.”
I checked my phone. “I haven’t heard anything from Tommy Lopez yet. He must be really busy.”
“Maybe too busy to investigate something like this,” Summer said.
“Oh no,” I said, recognizing the tone in her voice. “You’re not thinking that we should do it?”
“I’m not thinking we at all,” Summer said. “I’m thinking me. Nothing dangerous. Just asking the Barksdales some innocent questions about their snake.”
“Anything involving the Barksdales is potentially dangerous,” I said.
“They’re never going to be honest with Fish and Wildlife,” Summer declared. “And they’ve already refused to tell you where they got the anaconda. But I think they’d talk to me. Especially if I acted like this.” Summer suddenly shifted her personality, going from her standard, low-key attitude to that of a slightly ditzy, fascinated girl. “You have an anaconda?” she asked breathlessly. “That’s soooo cool. Where’d you get it?” She batted her eyelashes and then pursed her lips, making herself appear coy and demure. Summer was very pretty, and when she laid it on like this, she could look like a magazine cover model.
“I think that would work,” Xavier said quickly. He had become a bit flushed, watching Summer.
I had the sneaking suspicion that, if I hadn’t already known Summer, and she had talked to me that way, I would have spilled my guts to her.
“The Barksdales won’t trust you, either,” I cautioned Summer. “They hate you. You pulled their pants down in front of the entire school, remember?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Summer said. “Teenage boys are idiots.”
I noticed Dad laughing to himself.
“Please tell her this is a bad idea,” I asked him.
“This is a bad idea,” Dad repeated, but in a tone that indicated he didn’t really mean it. I got the sense that Dad wanted to see how this all played out.
We came to a puddle so big it was practically a lake. The driveway disappeared into it and emerged on the far side, where three waterlogged cattle were up to their knees in it. There was no way around it, so Dad drove right through the middle. Water sloshed up against the sides of the car, giving the impression that we were in a boat rather than an automobile.
“Maybe I could take Violet with me too,” Summer said thoughtfully. “The Barksdales definitely have the hots for her. They’d probably give her the PIN numbers for their bank accounts if she asked.”
“Ooh!” Xavier exclaimed. “We could run some sort of sting operation! The two of you could question them while Teddy and I listened in somehow!”
“Right,” I said sarcastically. “The girls could wear wires and we could wait inside one of those nondescript vans like in the movies.”
“Exactly!” Xavier said.
“I was joking,” I told him.
He frowned at me. “Don’t you care about bringing reptile smugglers to justice?”
“Of course,” I said. “I just think that it should be handled by people whose job it is, and not us.”
Xavier said, “If law enforcement were doing their jobs, the Barksdales wouldn’t have an anaconda right now, would they?”
“Here we are,” Dad said, keeping the conversation from going any further.
We had arrived at the front gate. Summer’s car was still there, parked on the shoulder of the road. Tran got out to greet her, looking nice and dry, having waited out the storm in the comfort of the car. A paperback novel sat flapped open in the front seat; it appeared he had plowed through about half of it in the time we had been at the ranch.
Normally, Summer would have been game to head back to FunJungle with us, but she seemed desperate to get home and clean off. “I’ll call you later to talk about our sting operation,” she said, then gave me a quick peck on the cheek and climbed out of our car.
“There is no sting operation!” I yelled after her.
She gave me a devilish grin and got into her car.
Dad had barely pulled back onto the road again when my phone started buzzing. I took it from my pocket, hoping it was Tommy Lopez calling, but was surprised to see the caller ID listed as “Sheriff Dept.”
I answered it cautiously. “Hello?”
“Is this Theodore Fitzroy?” a woman asked.
“Yes.”
“This is Officer Karen Brewster. I just saw you at the dig site.”
The volume on the phone was up loud enough that Dad and Xavier could hear this. Both looked at me, intrigued.
“Oh!” I said, surprised. “Hi. Did you get out before the storm?”
“No. It came up too fast. The digging crew and I had to wait it out in the woods, which didn’t work so well. We all got pretty soaked.”
“Sorry. Um. How did you get my number?”
“I called the department. We had it in our database. You’re sort of a known quantity around here, given your involvement in various crimes.”
“Oh,” I said again, unsure whether to be flattered or concerned.
Dad signaled me to turn on the speaker function, which I did, so that he and Xavier could hear better.
“I hate to bother you,” Officer Brewster went on, “but the girl you were out here with, that was Summer McCracken, correct?”
So someone had recognized Summer after all. I thought about denying it, but decided that it wouldn’t be smart to lie to a police officer. “Yes.”
“Is she with you right now?”
“No. She just got into her own car.”
“Good. Because I’d like to talk to you about this case.”
“Without Summer? Because she’s been as much a part of solving crimes around here as I have.”
“I’m not calling you to ask for your help. I’m calling to ask you some questions about Miss McCracken.”
I felt a chill go up my spine that had nothing to do with the mud in my pants. “You don’t think she had something to do with the theft of the dinosaur?”
“No, not her,” Officer Brewster said. “But I’m quite sure her father did. In fact, he’s my number one suspect
.”
7 RUBY’S
“What?” I gasped.
I wasn’t the only one who was surprised. Xavier had to clamp his hand over his mouth to keep from making a sound and tipping off Officer Brewster that he was listening in, while Dad was so startled he briefly drifted onto the other side of the road. Luckily, the roads out by the Bonotto Ranch were rarely traveled, especially after a storm, so there wasn’t anyone else out there for us to run into.
“I’m telling you this in the strictest confidence,” Officer Brewster said, “as you appear to be friends with Miss McCracken. You can’t say a word of this to her. Or anyone else.”
“Of course,” I said, with a furtive glance at Xavier. “Why do you suspect J.J.?”
“According to Dr. Chen, Mr. McCracken is the only person besides anyone on the dig team who knew about the tyrannosaur. She wasn’t sure how he heard about it, but he has already offered to purchase the skeleton several times. Seems he wants it for his theme park. Maybe to go in the dinosaur exhibit.”
That sounded plausible. There was an enormous dinosaur exhibit at the end of the World of Reptiles building featuring all sorts of animatronic prehistoric beasts. (It had always bugged me that it was in the reptile building, when dinosaurs had been proven to be more closely related to birds, but most tourists didn’t seem to care; the exhibit was one of the most popular attractions at FunJungle.) I could imagine J.J. wanting an actual dinosaur skeleton for it. And yet…
“If J.J. had made multiple offers to buy the dinosaur, why would he steal it?” I asked.
At the same time, Xavier had apparently thought of something as well, because he quickly unzipped his book bag, dug out a journal, and started scribbling in it furiously.
“The Bonottos were hoping to auction off the skull to the highest bidder,” Officer Brewster replied. “So they rejected the offers, which upset J.J. I’m guessing that he didn’t want to get into competition with anyone else, so he stole the skull.”
Xavier finished writing, tore out the page, and handed it to me. It was a question for Brewster. I took it from him and read, “It doesn’t make sense that he’d want it for FunJungle. If he puts it on display, then everyone will know that he’s the one who had it frozen.”