Bone Hunter

by Sarah Andrews

  Tug. She fiddled, tying the first knot.

  “So that’s your story. Okay,” Bert said lightly, as if that was all just fine and settled now. “So we have a homicide on our hands, and maybe you can help us with it, then.”

  My arm rocked slightly with the intern’s ministrations. “Fine,” I said. “Just ask your questions. I’m not going anywhere.” Nice, Em. Make it sound defensive.

  “Why don’t you just take it from the top?”

  Tug. “Certainly. I am a geologist. I am in town for a conference on vertebrate paleontology. Dr. Dishey invited me. I’m supposed to deliver a short speech this afternoon at one of the symposia,” I said, being somewhat snotty about my Latin plurals for the occasion. “I had never met him before last night, when I drove in from the airport. I had only spoken with him on the phone. My plane was late, delayed by weather coming out of Denver. I’d give you the flight number, but it’s with my luggage in Dr. Dishey’s house.”

  Tug.

  “When I got in, Dr. Dishey offered me a drink, but I said I was tired and just wanted to go to bed. I did just that. Alone. In a separate room from Dr. Dishey. That was at about nine. This morning early, I heard the phone ring. I heard Dr. Dishey answer it. He was shouting. Quite abruptly, the conversation ended, and half a minute later, I heard him go out. He slammed the door. I heard his vehicle start. Big engine. Sounded like a truck. I heard it leave. I went back to sleep. I stayed asleep until about seven.”

  Pressure. Tug.

  My stomach was starting to swim again. I swallowed hard and told myself it was the anesthetic. Tried not to think about the fact that I was lying on my back, and that this man was leaning over me. “I got up, showered, ate breakfast, waited around for a while, and then headed for my rental car. Halfway there, I realized I didn’t have my keys. I thought about waiting awhile longer for Dr. Dishey to show up, but I didn’t like sitting around on his front porch waiting, so I looked at the window, realized what an old-fashioned latch it had, and thought I’d give it a go. That was when Officer, ah, Raymond showed up.”

  The intern made a fifth and last stitch, finishing her embroidery, and began dressing the wound. I dared open my eyes. The man Bert, obviously a police detective—he was in civvies, after all, and had that kind of cozy “tell me everything” attitude some of them affect—smiled at me, a kind of ghoulish attagirl. I blinked, hoping he was some narcotic-induced dream bubble that would pop and disappear, but he only swayed slightly, further unseating my stomach. He was somewhere in his forties, with thinning hair combed back in strings, and possessed of rather opaque pale greenish eyes, like two cabuchons of Persian turquoise. Abstract thoughts like that occur to geologists—comparisons between animate and inanimate objects—and they throw us off sometimes. With the stress of being questioned and the local anesthetic confusing the million nerve endings in my beleaguered thumb, the thought upset my mental filing system, putting Detective Bert geographically under P for Persia, rather than under U for Utah.

  “You could not see this telephone.” He leaned farther over me. The ceiling seemed to crawl.

  “No. It was in another room. I did not see the telephone, Dr. Dishey, or anything else.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was not yet light out. There were streetlights, but my bedroom was in the back of the house. The blinds are heavy. There was no clock. I did not look at my watch.”

  “So you do not, in fact, know what time this telephone rang.” His tone was still light, but I could feel the pressure of his choice of words, the subtle assertions that said, You don’t know what you’re talking about, or, You’re lying.

  Straining to keep my voice level, I said, “No. If I had to guess, I’d say about five.”

  “What exactly did Dr. Dishey shout into this telephone you did not see?”

  I took a long, deep breath, mentally counted to ten, and reminded myself that I had nothing to hide. Wondered if I should ask to have a lawyer present. Tried to remember if he or Officer Raymond had read me my rights. Wished the anesthesia had been general. “I couldn’t hear much. He just sounded angry.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Well … okay, I remember a few choice epithets, the kind of thing you’d know anywhere, just by the rhythm of the words.” I paused, squeezed my eyes shut again. Would Officer Raymond be shocked that I knew the rhythms of four-letter words? And what in hell did I care for? “There was something that sounded like ‘You can’t!’ and, ‘You’ll bust the thing to pieces,’ but I could be wrong. I was more asleep than awake.”

  “Ah. So then you went back to sleep.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you awoke about seven.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you always sleep ten hours at night, Em?” He sounded incredulous, like I was having him on and he felt it was time to tell the little girly that the Man knew better.

  The sting of his insinuation landed right on top of the realization that he had guessed my nickname correctly. Em is what my friends call me, and much as I hate being called Emily, it rankled me that he should presume to be so familiar. Had he made a lucky guess, or had I told him? No, I was certain I had not. I had, in fact, only offered my driver’s license as explanation of who I was, had given it to Officer Raymond before he loaded me up and brought me to the hospital. Which meant he still had it now. Which meant I couldn’t drive, even if I could retrieve my keys.

  Rather than feel fear, I chose anger, and it swept through me like fire. I opened my eyes and fixed a glare on the detective. “Listen, Bert. I know you have a job to do here, and I know it’s a tough one. Really. You’ll find this statement a little hard to believe, too, but I have some experience with police investigations. I am a geologist, but I have been involved with four separate homicide investigations as a special witness. I can present my bona fides. Call the Denver PD and ask for Carlos Ortega in Homicide. In fact, I have worked so closely with him that I can give you his direct number. Would you do that for me? Hmm? Would you call him?”

  The intern, having finished her chore and cleaned up her utensils, hopped up off her stool and left the room. The detective spread his lips and cheeks into a wide smile that left his pale eyes looking like they’d been painted on as an afterthought. “Sure,” he said. “All in due time. Tell me about this conference you say you are attending.”

  I tried to shift my mental gears into neutral. Tried to be Em Hansen the professional, the person who had her game face together to attend a conference outside of her specialty. “It’s the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. Up in Snowbird.”

  “You’re a paleontologist?”

  “I am a geologist, like I said. My specialty is in oil and gas.”

  “But you’re going to a paleontology conference.”

  “Yes. Dr. Dishey is a vertebrate paleontologist. A dinosaur specialist.”

  “Dinosaurs,” he echoed.

  “Carnivorous dinosaurs, in fact,” I said nastily. “He invited me to the conference to speak on my other, ah, specialty.”

  “Which is?”

  “Forensic geology. That’s why I’ve been involved with murder investigations,” I asserted levelly. “It is sometimes necessary to understand geology in order to solve a crime. And I’m supposed to speak there this afternoon,” I added, looking pointedly at the clock.

  The detective smiled obnoxiously, raising his eyebrows in a mockery of looking impressed. “Ah, a latter-day Sherlock Holmes. You look at the dirt on the victim’s shoes and know he was down by the quarry.”

  At first, I did not favor his jest with a reply. Then I said, “That’s just part of it. More often, it’s a matter of having inside knowledge of the profession. Goes to motivation,” I said importantly.

  With elaborate condescension, the detective said, “And Dr. Dishey thought you should tell his friends all about it.”

  “I suppose he thought it would add a little spice,” I hissed.

  Angry as I was, I had hoped I’d
badgered him into offering a heated rejoinder, but instead, the detective said coolly, “You could go on one of those TV shows. ‘Dead Bodies and the Women Who Love Them.’ Now, about that nice long sleep you had.”

  “That what?”

  “You were in the nice carnivorous dinosaur man’s house, and—”

  “Fine. I slept only seven hours. I don’t sleep well in strange places, so I read for a while.”

  He raised his eyebrows in happy interest. “Wonderful. What ya reading?”

  “The Refiner’s Fire.”

  “What?”

  I heard Officer Raymond shift suddenly. I rolled my head toward him and looked at him. His lips had parted. He was surprised, and looked into my eyes for the first time, looked deep inside, as if he expected to find someone he knew in there, someone who’d been missing for years. Recovering himself, he looked away and spoke to the detective. “Refiner’s Fire. By John L. Brooke.”

  Now it was my turn to gape. The Refiner’s Fire was a thick scholarly tome on the roots of Mormon cosmology. I had found it on the bookshelf in my room. I had selected it expressly because it had looked dry and brainy enough to put me to sleep. What was a rank-and-file cop doing reading it?

  Now the detective smiled his geek smile at Officer Raymond. “One of your church books. Ah.” He turned back to me. “So you read until midnight, woke up when the phone rang at you think five, went back to sleep until seven. Then you took a shower and ate. What did you eat, Em?”

  I took another deep breath, closed my eyes. “Burritos. From the freezer. I don’t recommend them; in fact, I’d love it if someone could rustle up a decent doughnut for me. But I ate them, and there you have it. I waited for Dr. Dishey to return. He did not. I got restless. I decided to do some sight-seeing.”

  “And yet you waited until ten-thirty?”

  Now I colored, a nice red blush from collarbone to scalp. If Officer Raymond knew about books on Mormon cosmology, he was sure as hell going to have an opinion about my reasons for tarrying another hour before setting out to my car. “I just waited,” I said firmly.

  “You waited,” the detective said, his voice edging on accusation. “You waited.”

  “That’s enough!” I said. “Are you charging me with a crime, or am I free to go?” I jerked my right hand into a fist, clanging the bracelet of the handcuff as it tightened against the frame of the gurney. “You call Carlos Ortega! You do it now!”

  Interestingly, it was Officer Raymond who moved to bring things to a conclusion. He stepped halfway out into the hall and signaled to a nurse. “We done here?” he called.

  The detective looked at him with an expression bordering on disgust. Then he looked back at me and grinned almost maniacally. “Don’t leave town,” he said, like he thought the line funny.

  3

  THE RIDE UP TO SNOWBIRD WAS PURE MISERY. ABOUT THE last thing I would have chosen for my grand entrance to the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology was to arrive by gleaming white squad car labeled POLICE in ten-inch blue letters and be escorted in by a cop. I felt nauseated enough at the thought of walking into that conference, presuming, as I was, to speak to them about my work in forensic geology. Imagine standing up in front of seven or eight hundred of the brightest, best-trained observers on the planet and saying something that they might find laughably naive. Now imagine doing that with gauze an inch thick all around your thumb and grass and blood stains all down your slacks, accompanied by a drop-dead good-looking cop in navy blue uniform, badge, gun belt, and nifty little radio that has a habit of gargling at him intermittently. You can’t hardly suggest that the car is some rental you picked up at the airport, or that what’s-his-name is a paleontologist who’s just a wee bit eccentric in his choice of attire.

  I sat miserably in the front seat of Officer Raymond’s prowl car, ruing the day I’d been born. Detective Bert had allowed as how he wasn’t ready yet to let me back into George Dishey’s house to get my car keys—his crew was still busy there—and decided it was to his advantage to have me go on to the conference with Officer Raymond. This is what I get for making a stink about going on about my business, I’d told myself, but I’d been around enough police investigations to know I was getting off easy. They could have delayed me well into the next day.

  I could just imagine the conversation up at Snowbird: “So, Ms. Hansen, we missed you at the conference Sunday afternoon. Might you tell us why you failed to present your talk?”

  Answer: “I was in the jug.”

  Little that I now felt mentally or emotionally prepared to give my forensics speech, being kept from doing so would have been the final humiliation. In that moment, I hated Detective Bert so much that I wanted him to come, wanted the pleasure of watching him sit stupefied in the audience as I addressed the multitude on the wisdom gleaned from four previous murder investigations. Yes, Bert, four! Four separate cases I have solved in my short career as an accidental detective. And come to think of it, this George Dishey murder smells like another one you need my help with. You need someone who understands the profession and the professionals, an insider who can spot the flaw in the picture, pierce the veil of mystery around the murder of your dead paleontologist there.

  Bert had seemed to think it riotously amusing to assign Officer Raymond to drive me up to Snowbird. “So you want to make detective,” Bert had sneered at him. “Yeah, I saw your application there in the stack. Big aspirations for the homeboy. Big break for you—you found the corpse, and then, momma bar the door, you race right over to the home of the deceased to see what else you can find. You ever hear of procedures, cowboy? Once the case is handed over to us, we do the house and family stuff. You go back to checking Dumpsters for lost dogs. Well, hotshot, here’s your big chance. You take little Emily up there to her rock-jockey conference at the cushy ski resort and make sure she plays nicely with the other boys and girls.”

  As he drove me up through the spectacular glacier-cut valley of Little Cottonwood Canyon toward Snowbird, Officer Raymond kept his eyes on the road. He didn’t appear to find any more humor in baby-sitting me than I did, but I could see where big Bert’s mind was going. By sending me to the meeting with a police escort, he could call attention to the matter of George Dishey’s death in a suitably imposing manner; unless I missed my guess, a few of Bert’s colleagues would be there ahead of us, working the crowd, blending in with the gathered paleontological faithful, digging for motives among George Dishey’s brethren.

  When we reached Snowbird, Officer Raymond turned off the highway and parked that squad car right in front of the conference center—the soaring eleven-story glass face of the Cliff Lodge—nudging it in next to the short-term loading and unloading position at the curb by the main entrance.

  I stumped inside, rode the escalator up one level to the registration desk, and identified myself. “Em Hansen,” I said. “I’m a speaker. This is Officer Raymond of the Salt Lake City Police Department. He wishes to speak with the general chair of the conference.”

  The cushiony middle-aged lady who was passing out registration packages took one look at Officer Raymond and gaped. I don’t think it was his looks that got her. I think she just didn’t know what to say. I supposed her job orientation had lacked instruction regarding the handling of miscellaneous visiting police officers.

  Finally, she pulled herself together and got to digging for my registration card. When she found it, she frowned. “I have an Emily Hansen, but there’s no speaker’s ribbon with it,” she said apologetically.

  “Let me see the schedule,” I said. “I’m supposed to speak in a symposium this afternoon.”

  She dealt me a program. I dug through the Sunday list. Nothing. No Em Hansen speaking on forensic geology at the forensic paleontology symposium. In fact, no symposium on forensic paleontology altogether. I checked Monday. I checked Tuesday. I checked the luncheon-speaker slots, the dinner speakers. Nothing. The carpet and floorboards under my feet seemed increasingly insubstantial, as if
they were about to give way and send me plummeting into the bowels of the earth.

  Officer Raymond peered over my shoulder. “No talk?” he asked bluntly.

  “Must be some sort of misprint,” I mumbled, but I could feel his eyes burning into me, knew he was thinking that I’d made the whole thing up.

  I reopened the registration package, scanned it for the names of the prime movers of the conference. “It says here that Daniel J. Sherbrooke is the conference ‘Host Committee Chair.’ That’s who you want to see.” To the lady, I said, “Where can we find him?”

  She got up from the registration table and led us across a dizzying series of Persian carpets toward a flight of stairs that led down to a sumptuous reception area in front of the ballrooms. I glanced quickly around the sea of conferees, searching for anyone who looked familiar, but saw only strangers. They ranged from starving graduate students in their mid-twenties to established, if well-worn, academics to crumpling white-haired geezers who intended to go out with their professional boots on. They were geoscientists, to be sure; save for a few who were camouflaged in suits, they all had that hearty, weathered, abstracted look of the intellectual who prefers to be outdoors. Most were what you’d have to call casually dressed. Some were neatly but pragmatically groomed and decked out in slacks and sweaters, and a few had affected swanky, if somewhat eccentric, styles reminiscent of riverboat gamblers. A large faction wore T-shirts with pictures of dinosaurs on them, blue jeans, and cowboy boots. These seemed blissfully at ease with hair that had grown out and out and out without benefit of barbering; men with beards and ponytails, women with dull hair that drooped. They all sucked abstractedly at cups of coffee, some talking with colleagues, others staring unself-consciously into inner space. I began to feel less conspicuous.