Mesozoic Murder

by Christine Gentry

  Leslie stared, as unmoving as a statue for several seconds. “What makes you think I know about it?”

  “You’re a geologist,” Ansel said, grinning so she wouldn’t seem threatening.

  “Yes, I am. However, fossil resins and their subgroups aren’t my field. Those types of organic materials are relegated to techno geology studies pertaining to oil and coal. My field is physical geology.”

  Ansel was flustered. Leslie had never been shy about his accomplishments or talents. Normally, he expounded on any subject relating to geology. Backpedaling over his professional expertise defied everything she knew about him.

  “That’s strange,” she replied bluntly.

  “What is?”

  “Evelyn told me she’d seen a copy of your Yale University paper on resinous caustobioliths inside Nick’s apartment. She said it appeared in the Metamorphic Geology Journal. I wanted to read it.”

  Leslie’s face shot through expressions of shock, annoyance, and fear in a matter of seconds. His wrinkled face turned ashen. His intense gray eyes enlarged into nickels beneath his thick prescription lenses. His hands clenched upon his lap, skeletal fingers turning pale.

  “Are you all right, Leslie?”

  “Just tired. Evelyn made a mistake. I didn’t write the paper.”

  “Really? She was quite astute when it came to knowing about scholarly publications and their authors.”

  “Well, she was confused. I’d hardly forget a journal paper if I wrote it. I may be archaic, but I’m not senile.” He managed a brief, forced smile.

  “You taught at Yale.”

  “Yes. I worked in the geology department for ten years before I retired to Montana. Now I just want to live out my life writing and enjoying the fruits of my labor. No hassles.”

  “You must have been really annoyed when Nick asked for money.”

  Leslie’s mouth flew open. He leaned forward defensively, the survival instincts of a startled animal preparing for battle. “What?”

  “Cameron told me you lent Nick money.”

  “Biesel the Weasel,” Leslie scoffed. “I should have known. That prig. He sticks his snout into everyone’s business.”

  “You didn’t give Nick money?”

  “Yes, I lent Nick some money. One time. Is there a law against that?” Leslie fixed her with a challenging glare.

  “Of course not. I’m just curious why he came to you.”

  Leslie snorted. “I guess Nick thought I had money to spare. He came to see me after I received my first royalty check for Walk Your Dinosaur. Said he’d made some bad investments and needed something to tide him over until the next paycheck. I was flush so I loaned him five hundred dollars. It was no big deal. I don’t appreciate Bieselmore gossiping about it.”

  Ansel shook her head. “Nick lied. He didn’t have a paycheck coming. He’d quit his job and left his wife. His old fossil collection is gone. He probably sold it to pay for expenses. I want to know why you’re lying to me now, Leslie. If you were so flush, why couldn’t you pay your dues to the Pangaea Society?”

  “You’re blowing this out of proportion. The fact is, I’m displeased that you’ve been perusing my personal files. I thought we had an amicable relationship, Ansel.”

  Ansel nodded. “You don’t have to explain anything but, believe it or not, I’m trying to help you. The police would have asked you the same questions if they’d known you loaned Nick money. Eventually Cameron will tell them, and they’ll be back. I could have told Dorbandt about this loan several times, too, but I didn’t.”

  Leslie fiddled with his entwined hands, then studied his lap for several seconds before looking up again. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  Ansel saw through Leslie’s deception. Guilt etched its way across his haggard face as a spider web of new worry lines. He was stonewalling about something. Something that hinged either on the journal article he denied writing or on Nick’s loan. She had to turn up his fear factor a few notches.

  “Having anything to do with Nick during the last year could be dangerous. I was attacked in my trailer two nights ago by a man looking for money Nick owed.”

  “You were attacked?” Leslie swiped a bead of perspiration from his face. “My God. Were you hurt?”

  “No. I was lucky.” Ansel leaned toward the geologist. “Please tell me what you know, Leslie.”

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “The paper on caustobioliths is yours.”

  “No,” he insisted.

  “I can call the Yale library and find a copy. I’ll get one faxed to me and read it.”

  Leslie leaped from the recliner. “There is no paper.”

  “I can also call the Dean of the Department of Sciences and inquire about it. If that doesn’t work, I’ll contact the editor of the Metamorphic Geology Journal.”

  “Leave this alone,” Leslie yelled, his face turning fuchsia.

  “Tell me why I should,” Ansel shot back.

  “You’re out of line, Ansel.”

  “I’ll call Detective Dorbandt.”

  “Don’t,” Leslie wailed in fear. “What do you want from me?”

  “I want you to level with me.”

  “Why can’t you forget about it? That paper has haunted me for years. I made a mistake. One stupid, stupid mistake.”

  Leslie stumbled and practically fell backward into the recliner, his hands over his face. He moaned several times and then regained control. He pulled off his glasses and wiped his eyes. When he looked up, his face was flushed, his gaze watery and weak. Ansel feared he would have a stroke. He looked totally drained and defeated.

  “Nick was blackmailing you,” she said.

  In his private hell, Leslie could barely nod. “Yes. The filthy bum was bleeding me dry.”

  Chapter 21

  “Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours.”

  Black Elk, Oglala Sioux

  Leslie’s confession didn’t surprise Ansel. The Nick she’d been learning about was capable of anything. An unbidden sense of alarm crept into her mind as she sat on the couch across from the distraught man.

  Leslie was truly distressed over Nick and Evelyn’s deaths, but were his feelings those of remorse and guilt rather than sadness and loss? Had they blackmailed Leslie? Had Leslie decided to free himself from their stranglehold forever?

  “Did you kill Nick and Evelyn?”

  Leslie’s head snapped up. “My God, no. How could you think that?”

  “I don’t know what to think. How did Nick blackmail you?”

  “I was a senior researcher in the Yale School of Geological Sciences and held an extracurricular job for the Journal of Earth Sciences. As a referee reviewer I scrutinized the work of researchers who submitted their papers for publication. Two independent reviewers have to approve a research paper for merit and scientific accuracy before it’s printed.

  “One day I received a paper from Earth Sciences entitled, ‘Pyrolysis Processes in Caustobioliths: Destructive Chemical Breakdown by Heat,’ authored by two Harvard researchers. The senior scientist, Carolyn Ryes, had received her first review approval and was one step away from publication.”

  Leslie peered nervously over his glasses at Ansel. “I haven’t spoken about this for a long time. I’m so ashamed.”

  Ansel gave the tortured man an encouraging smile. “Please, go on.”

  “At that same time, I was coauthoring a paper on processing caustobioliths via heat with Jack Kittredge, a senior author. Kittredge held a fellowship at Yale and taught as a member of the faculty. Ryes’ research resembled the exact research we’d done for two years, but hers demonstrated a more efficient experimental technique and superior writing.”

  Ansel was familiar with the “publish or perish” mentality of professorial politics, where research grants and tenure slots depended on the gospel of the printed, scientific Word. The bickering and backstabbing between academic departments and colleges maimed careers. She’d
experienced firsthand the corruption and deceit of fellow students chasing a career and big money.

  Ansel nodded. “I can see why you’d be upset.”

  “I panicked. The research was my final manuscript submission before retirement. My last few years of work would have been for nothing. The odds that Ryes’ paper would come to me for review were astronomical. I believed Fate had brought it to me, and I decided to do something about it.”

  “What?”

  “I rejected Ryes’ paper, sending it back to Earth Sciences with a recommendation for revision. Before I returned the paper, I sent it to Kittredge. A week later, he sent me an updated copy of his research data, which was transformed into a thoughtful, well-written, and well-documented analysis of our project. We submitted our paper to the North American Journal of Metamorphic Geology. It was printed two months later.”

  Ansel hitched in a ragged breath as the shock of his words registered. Leslie had tutored Kittredge in the fine art of scientific fraud. Tidying up experimental data or pulling whole scientific experiments out of thin air by copping Carolyn Ryes’ work challenged every popular conceit about science being the search for truth through objectivity.

  “Did Ryes find out?”

  Leslie nodded. “Ryes didn’t see our paper in Metamorphic Geology until several months later. By then her revised manuscript was going to the Journal of Earth Sciences for review again. She went ballistic.”

  Maze squirmed in his seat. “Aside from being a top-notch scientist, Ryes was as tenacious as a bulldog. She insisted that Kittredge and I had plagiarized her manuscript. She also charged we conspired to thwart her from getting her work published first. The ensuing upheaval over her claims continued for a year.”

  The woman’s persevering nature impressed Ansel. Normally such a serious accusation by Ryes would have meant nothing stacked against Leslie’s protests of innocence. Only a few staunch college administrators would have questioned Leslie’s esteemed judgment or prowess as senior researcher, even if the Maze-Kittredge study wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. The academic elite rarely endured the rigorous peer scrutiny that others did and suffered the consequences for their actions even less.

  “How did it end, Leslie?”

  “The college dean ordered an impartial review audit of Kittredge’s experimental data. Kittredge buckled and admitted he saw Ryes’ manuscript. On top of that, Kittredge’s experimental data didn’t add up as authentic. The backlash resulted in our paper being retracted from the Metamorphic Geology Journal. The university succeeded in raking over this embarrassing pitfall in their collegiate landscape. None of this ever became public.”

  “What happened to Ryes?”

  “Her manuscript was published in Earth Sciences, and she left Harvard, taking an oil corporation job. Kittredge resigned his fellowship. He acquired a position with the federal government. The Dean of Sciences insisted I take a slightly early retirement.”

  Ansel steered the conversation back on track. “How did Nick get the paper?”

  “I’m not sure, but he knew about the scandal. He came to see me in January and demanded a thousand dollars. Not a loan. A gift. I refused. He pulled out the paper. From then on, Nick wanted installments every two weeks up until four weeks ago. When Nick didn’t show up to collect, I was relieved. I thought he’d gotten what he wanted from me and would stay away.”

  “Those payoffs must have hit your wallet pretty hard.”

  “It was draining my savings account, but what else could I do? I couldn’t have the incident revealed to the newspapers.”

  “Surely, a scandal that old wouldn’t impact your life here that badly,” Ansel probed.

  Leslie looked at her with hooded eyes. “There’s something I didn’t tell you.”

  “What?”

  “During the investigation, Ryes made certain allegations about my relationship with Kittredge. I simply can’t have those preposterous slanders repeated again. Not after I’ve become nationally acclaimed for my young adult books.”

  His tone told Ansel the truth. “Were they allegations of homosexuality?”

  Leslie bobbed his head. “I didn’t know Kittredge was gay. I had a wife and family, and the repercussions in my private life were horrible. I won’t go through that experience again.”

  “You hated Nick, didn’t you?”

  Leslie gazed toward the living-room windows. His face slackened as if his mind had flown far away from the tiny room. “Yes, but I didn’t kill him.”

  Ansel stood. “Do you have a copy of the paper?”

  Slowly rising from the recliner, Leslie left the living room on shaky legs. Ansel watched as he disappeared into an adjacent hallway. Tired of sitting, she spent the next few moments walking around the room, gravitating toward the TV/stereo wall unit to survey a large color portrait of Leslie and a small elderly, gray-haired woman.

  Leslie wore a brown wool suit. The woman wore a long-sleeved, brightly flowered dress with a pleated front. A gold-tone pin fastened over her heart read “Anna.” The bird sculptress. His deceased wife and Shane’s grandmother. Ansel wondered how Shane would react if he knew Nick had been blackmailing his grandfather.

  Footfalls caused Ansel to turn. Leslie approached carrying a sheaf of folded papers. “Take the damned thing out of here. When you’re done, destroy it.”

  Ansel took the papers from his trembling, liver-spotted hand. “Thank you. Everything will be all right.”

  “I wish I could be so optimistic.” Leslie adjusted the glasses on his hawk nose. “Nick had a sick side to his personality we never knew about, Ansel. He had a devil inside him.”

  “We all do, Leslie.”

  ***

  “You want something else?” asked the burly man behind the cheap oak counter at the Red Rose Bar.

  For the first time in an hour, Ansel looked up from the wood bar shellacked to a reflective sheen. The shiny surface acted like a fun house mirror, distorting her scowling features into a goblin leer. She pushed two empty glasses toward the huge, muscle-bound Indian and nodded.

  “Sure. Make it the same. No ice. I hate ice.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Omaha Henry. “I know how you like ’em, Sarcee. You been coming here for years, ain’t you?”

  Ansel peered at Henry thoughtfully. She’d known the Sioux bartender since he’d lost his job as a professional wrestler fighting under the Mandan pseudonym of Chief Omaha. A spinal injury ended his celebrity status, and he’d taken up tending bar. Henry’s calloused hands eclipsed the beer mug and the shot glass, but he handled them with the grace of an Austrian crystal cutter as he carted them away.

  Ansel gazed around the seedy interior and pondered the lethargic crowd in attendance. The jukebox pumped out Waylon Jennings’ “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” though nobody listened, and the demands for Henry’s services were few and far between. A couple of Indians drank beers at a front table, but most of the action was happening in the back. A crowd of five Indians gathered around a large table, watching as a raucous gambling game ran its inevitable course, and the jobless men went broke.

  She didn’t come to the Red Rose often, only when she felt her Blackfoot bloodlines chafing against her whiteness. Touted in the reservation newspapers as a “Native American Tavern,” the disintegrating wood structure was just off the Fort Peck Reservation so a liquor license could be procured. The joint was nothing but a hooch shack.

  Omaha Henry returned and set another boilermaker in front of her. He wiped down the scarred bar with a blue rag that foamed with dish soap and smelled like lemons. “My advice is to slow down. It’s late, and I don’t want to call your father and have him pick you up because you can’t drive.”

  Ansel didn’t reply right away. When she was seventeen her father had caught her hanging around the bar and accused her of slumming with underage Indian boys for cheap thrills. She paled at the memory. She and her father hadn’t spoken for days after the incident. She’d finally gone to Chase and explained
that he’d misjudged her. The Red Rose represented one of the few places where she felt truly comfortable. It was far easier to be half-Indian near the reservation than to be half-Anglo near the Arrowhead Ranch.

  “I’m not drunk,” Ansel protested, flicking a strand of hair away from her face. “I’m deliciously numb.”

  “What’s the occasion?”

  “I’m going to a funeral tomorrow.” Ansel picked up the whiskey shot, poured it into the beer, and chugged down half the drink in one swallow. She set the mug carefully on the counter.

  “Sorry to hear that. Anyone I know?”

  “Nobody you’d want to know.”

  Henry studied her for several seconds. “What do you have there?” He pointed to a piece of paper in her hands.

  Ansel squinted at the small note clutched in one hand. A pencil scrawl read hmn-1880. She’d been trying to figure out what type of fossil specimen Nick had scanned into the machines. Maybe she was too close to the problem to see the answer.

  Ansel pushed the slip toward Henry. “It’s a puzzle. Any idea what this stands for?”

  Henry stared at the line with chocolate eyes. “Phone number?”

  Ansel sipped her drink. “Nope. I called every area code for 466-1880 in Montana. No such number. Try again.”

  “Okay. The first three letters are initials. The last four numbers are a year. Somebody did something in 1880.”

  “Without periods between each letter, I don’t think they’re initials, and the year eighteen-eighty doesn’t ring any bells.”

  Henry shook his head. “How about a Zip code but with a zero at either end like 01880 or 18800?”

  “Tried it. Massachusetts had a 01880 hit at Wakefield Station in Greenwood. There is no 18800 Zip code. Massachusetts doesn’t seem related to hmn.”

  “Then the hmn letters are an abbreviation for something. Eighteen-hundred and eighty of them.”

  Ansel laughed, the first time in hours. “Yeah, that’s the big question, isn’t it? What’s the something? I thought about abbreviations, so I looked up hmn in a book. I found Her Majesty’s Navy. That’s definitely not it.”