Bone Hunter

by Sarah Andrews

  “And this phantom’s fingerprints were in the storage unit. Where?”

  “On tools. Digging equipment. But there were no fresh fingerprints in the house except George’s and yours, and there were none on the stolen car. We lifted a partial of another man’s thumb print off one of the shell casings we found in it, though, which suggests the shooter loaded it a while before and wasn’t thinking about covering his tracks when he did that.”

  I said, “Then it was probably a hunting rifle.”

  “Yes, or something you’d carry in your pickup if you wanted to be armed but blend in with the crowd. We had reports of a beat-up green pickup with gun racks in the neighborhood earlier that evening, but no guns, and by the time we got that report, it was nowhere to be found.”

  I said, “I saw him yesterday.”

  “Who?”

  “Teague.”

  Not Tom Latimer’s eyes went wide. “Where?”

  “At the conference. Hiding in a van out behind the Cliff Lodge. Officer Raymond called in the license plate numbers. What ever became of that?”

  Carlos said, “Detective Bert just wrote a note on that. Clean. They found the van farther up the canyon, parked at a private home—no one in it, no one around. It was registered to a Frank Smeely.”

  The FBI agent sat up and grinned. “Gotcha, you dirty lowlife!”

  “Who?” I asked.

  He said, “Smeely is another commercial collector. Into the high-stakes stuff like the guys we prosecuted for the Sue case. I got fingerprints and prints from military boot in Dishey’s storage unit and I got my military escapee in Smeely’s van. Connect the dots.”

  “The guy with the Australian hat.”

  “That’s his style, yes.”

  I said, “But that doesn’t prove who killed George.”

  “Not.”

  I saw again in my mind’s eye the piercing look the man in the van had given me—an outrageous, soul-consuming come-hither stare—and felt a tour through a witness protection program looming in my future. I began to fidget with the salt shaker on the table, focusing my eyes on it, wishing it contained the whole universe within its simplicity. I said, “I had a glimpse of the guy who was following me. The shooter. He was wearing gloves—that’s what made his fingers seem so thick—but he wasn’t the man in that photograph. Well, I mean, not exactly. They looked kind of alike, maybe.”

  “Kind of like they were brothers, maybe?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yes, I saw your Identikit make. Our disappearing man had a kid brother. Also of the disappearing variety.”

  The memory of Nina’s face in full reverie filled my mind. The high cheek bones, the riveting stare. Were these men her kin? “What do you know about him?”

  “Dropped out of school at fourteen. Not a mental giant.”

  I sighed, remembering how easily I had spotted him, and how quickly he had panicked and fired on me and Ray. “That fits.” What had the man in the house been looking for when I came back more quickly than expected and interrupted him? “So you looked for George’s paperwork in the storage unit, but it wasn’t there. Were there any file cabinets at all?”

  “Yes, a small two-drawer. But both drawers had been emptied. Except for one sheet of paper that had slipped down underneath the bottom drawer.”

  I opened a palm upward. “Which said …”

  “It was an order form for Perma-Pak. That’s nitrogen-packed food.”

  I squinted. “Explain.”

  “If you want food with a nice long shelf life, you get it dried and packed in cans in nitrogen. Number-ten cans, in this case. Imagine what you’d do with a number-ten can of egg mix, for instance. It’ll keep up to five years until you open the can, but then you have to use it pretty fast. So it would help to have a big family, right? That’s about fifteen dozen eggs, as it turns out.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I phoned the contact on the order blank. It’s a place out in California. Nice woman answered the phone. She said she was surprised that I actually had an order blank, because their sort of customers usually phone her up from a pay booth and order it by the truckload—they get fifteen percent off that way—but they want to pay by cashier’s check and arrange a dead drop. You getting the picture? No paper trail.”

  “Militiamen?”

  “Militias, yes; she said Perma-Pak was number one on the gun-show circuit. She said someone had put her name and number down on some Web site as the woman to call for the dried foods. She calls them the ‘YTwoK crazies.’ They’re all certain that Armageddon’s going to hit in the year 2000. So you pack your basement full of canned foods.”

  Manna, I thought. Dried food … “But wait,” I said. “George lived alone. And I looked in his basement, and his refrigerator, for that matter. All he has is a week’s supply of frozen burritos.”

  “Then that means he’s either stockpiling somewhere else or acting as the go-between for somebody else.”

  “Beans for bones,” I said.

  “It’s a possibility,” the agent replied. “And George made notes on the bottom of the sheet: he’d evidently divided his allotment.”

  “With whom?’

  “With a guy named Lew.”

  I spun the salt shaker in the center of the table. “The geology department tech at the university here. He went on digs with Dan Sherbrooke.”

  The FBI agent whistled. When I looked up, he was smiling blissfully. “So Dan’s in this after all.”

  I said, “Could be. Running a dig’s expensive. And there’s all that prep work, and you got to pay for storage, and—but wait. Two drawers of filing is next to nothing. Anyone with a Ph.D. makes notes. It’s ground into you. A love of data. Information is power. Even if George didn’t like being pinned down on his facts, he had a roomful of books at his house, so he’d have records somewhere. So where were the rest of his files?”

  “Right,” said the agent. “There weren’t any marks on the floor to suggest that any other file cabinets had been removed, either. So where were his sales records? He had to have something to show the IRS, even if they were cooked records, because we’ve got his income-tax returns, and he lists sales to Smeely’s delightful little enterprise, among others. George didn’t have sales papers at home, either, and there were nothing but magazine articles, profession-related E-mails, and video games on his computer. Which all suggests he had another storage unit somewhere else. Where? If you were a person who liked your privacy and you’d just committed murder, you’d want those records, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And if you were in the business of selling fossils but you’d lost your middleman, you’d want to find out whom to contact. And then the mysterious Mr. X tosses the house. And then Bert tells Sherbrooke where I’m staying. And then someone tries to get into my motel room. And then I see your disappearing man at the conference in Smeely’s van.”

  The FBI agent grinned. “Interesting, huh?”

  I hung my head in misery. “Ver-r-r-y interesting.”

  AT THE SALT Palace, I waited inside the six-story-tall cylindrical glass entrance foyer, which was in fact a sounding chamber. Eight glass doors opened inward to the convention hall, and sixteen opened outward onto West Temple. Over each pair of doors was mounted a tall wooden acoustic sound box, like an organ pipe. Outside, along the sidewalk, stood a row of windmills, cocked at differing angles turning at differing rates in the morning breeze. As each blade completed a full rotation, an electronic pulse was transmitted to a corresponding sounding box, and a soft, ethereal tone reverberated through the chamber. I had never experienced anything like it before, and I was transfixed, soothed, in love. My stomach had been in a knot since speaking with the FBI agent, and I wanted to hang on to this fragile bit of tranquillity. Just as with the moment of looking into Ray’s eyes, I did not want to leave and face the outside world again, the world of professional jealousy and scientific scrutiny and child beating and renegade helicopter pilots with gun fetishes,
but neither did I want to go farther inside. Just then, inside scared me even more. How much sweeter to remain in this place between in and out, in the comfort of man-made shelter, but soothed by this acoustic reminder of nature’s power and presence.

  Ray waited with me. We were both silent, savoring our moment of safety.

  At 7:30, the bus arrived—the first of two, in fact—and I nodded good-bye to Ray. “I see old what’s-his-name getting on the second bus,” I whispered, carefully not looking toward Not Tom Latimer.

  Ray continued to stare up into the sound chamber, his lips moving silently.

  I said, “If he’s along, you don’t have to worry about me, right?”

  Ray’s eyes tightened with worry. “That’s not the message I get.” He lowered his gaze to me. “You have the phone number?”

  “Yes,” I said, patting the pocket that held a slip of paper with his mother’s phone number on it. If anything went wrong, I had promised I would call him there. He would be spending the day there baby-sitting Nina.

  “Go if you must,” he said.

  AT THE TOP step of the bus, I was greeted by that usual moment of social stress in which I, as newcomer, must make eye contact with a miscellany of strangers and decide which of the open seats I shall occupy. Two seats on each side of the center aisle, four columns of faces, eleven rows, all regarding me blankly, or staring out the windows, or falling back asleep, or focused in conversation with the persons nearest them. Dan Sherbrooke looked up briefly from where he sat up near the driver, his eyes magnified into his usual look of doelike surprise by his jury-rigged glasses. They held no special spark of recognition, let alone guilt. His face hung with apparent uninterest. I hurried past him.

  I found a roost about four rows from the front, next to a tall man of about sixty who had a full head of gray hair and a kind, thoughtful face. We introduced ourselves. His name was John, and he was curator of the vertebrate fossil collections at a large midwestern natural history museum. “So you’re into dinosaurs,” I said.

  John smiled. “Dinosaurs. You want to know what I think of dinosaurs?”

  “Yeah.”

  John pantomimed spitting on the floor. “I think that of dinosaurs. Now, fish to amphibian, early tetrapods, that’s where the interest is.”

  “Oh, really? Why?” I asked as the bus pulled out into the stream of southbound traffic and began its turns toward the highway.

  John regaled me for a space of fifteen or twenty minutes with a string of multisyllabic Latinate words I could only tangentially understand, and that much only because he spoke as often with his hands as with words, and larded his descriptions with more familiar words, such as jaw and leg. But his enthusiasm for his topic was infectious, and it was a pleasure to indulge, for the time being, in the safe, orderly life of the intellect. As he chatted away, I watched out the window for indications of where the bus was going. It turned south onto Interstate 15, whizzing past the rush-hour traffic flowing north from Provo.

  As John wound up his dissertation on the marvels of early land-dwelling four-limbed creatures, I said, “Thanks, I enjoyed that. But let me ask you: What do you say to people who ask you to justify your work?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m talking about the people who don’t believe in science, or in the work for its own sake.”

  “You mean the bureaucrats who want me to justify the work in dollars and cents. Like the folks who value the space program only because it brought us Velcro and Tang.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I ask them how they expect to do conservation if they don’t understand evolution.”

  I sighed with pleasure and relief at his simple pragmatism. “Thanks. I needed to hear that. I got into a wrangle with a creationist last evening, and it’s a pleasure to be reminded of how passionately a scientist cares about his work.”

  “Why, of course we feel passionately about it,” John replied. “If we weren’t passionate, how could we devote our lives to trying to understand just a little bit more about creation? And there’s the irony. We are studying creation, after all.”

  “Right,” said a bearded man across the aisle. “We just aren’t studying special creation. Although I’ve never seen that theory scrutinized. I wonder how it would stand up?”

  John said equitably, “I like to think I keep that theory out on the table while I work. This is science, after all. We are supposed to keep an open mind.”

  The bearded man shook his head ruefully. “Doesn’t it just burn your ass, John? Those assholes from the religious right had the gall to picket us! I mean, what’s their problem? Do they feel confident in their beliefs only if everybody agrees with them? They’d never make it in a scientific arena, where the whole job is to present ideas and evidence with the hope that someone will shoot it down if you’re not right.”

  John nodded his head thoughtfully.

  “I had to leave just as that was heating up yesterday,” I said. “And I missed the TV coverage of the press conference. What happened?”

  “You missed nothing,” said another voice.

  I looked up over my shoulder. Earthworm Magritte had moved up the aisle and was perched on the arm of a seat a row behind me. Today he was wearing a clean, if threadbare T-shirt with CALIFORNIA MUSEUM OF PALEOBIOLOGY, NOT OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, across it, but the pants looked like the same pair he’d had on the day before and the day before that. From this close-up, he was no less imposing a figure than I had encountered the two previous days, but certainly more human. He had rather sad eyes and, as I had noticed before, smelled pleasantly of mint. “It was the usual sound-bite crap,” he continued blunt as ever, “all this shit about ‘Scientists are out to disprove the existence of God.’ That’s an argument that starts out with the presumption that all scientists are atheists.”

  The bearded man said, “Aw, hell, I don’t believe in that God stuff, but that doesn’t mean I’m out to disprove it. I got better things to do with my time.”

  I smiled ironically. He sounded like Enos.

  “Well, and so what if you are an atheist?” said Magritte.

  “Although I’ll bet a year’s pay you’re a closet pantheist. A spirit in every rock.”

  “I take my spirits on the rocks,” said the bearded man.

  “But think about it,” said Magritte, “like John says, here we are devoting our professional lives to trying to understand just a little bit more about what we see around us.” He gestured out the window toward the steep rampart of the Wasatch Range, which rose imposingly behind the city of Provo. “What am I supposed to call all this? This is creation, a perfectly good noun from a standard dictionary. We’re all so fascinated by it that we spend our lives studying it. You want devotional activities, try a life’s work on for size. Creation’s designs and systems are nothing but exquisite, inspired. And some half-wit with a Bible steps up and accuses us of not feeling moved by it, of not being so damned impressed that we just want to spend our lives sitting humbly at its feet.”

  We sat quietly for a moment, contemplating our lives.

  The bearded man broke the reverie with a defiant laugh. “I’m still an atheist,” he insisted. “You’re trying to say there’s no difference between science and religion. I beg to differ.”

  “I agree,” Magritte hastened to say. “But there’s also an overlap. I looked the word religion up in my dictionary. The first definition is ‘Concern over the unseen,’ and things like that. The second definition is ‘A specific fundamental system of beliefs and practices agreed upon by a group of people.’ You’ve got to agree that both of those apply also to science.”

  John said reasonably, “But there’s a difference in intent.”

  “Perhaps,” Magritte answered. “But you get my drift. My vote is we redefine our terms, and agree to apply the term science to study of matters physical, and apply religion to the articles of faith and practice. Then we can save spiritual for matters of the soul.”

  John said, “The picketer
s would have a field day with you. That’s being way too rational.”

  I heard the familiar sound of Allison Lee clearing her adenoids. Her perfectly groomed face jutted into the aisle three rows back. “Yeah, face it, Worm, there are plenty of phenomena that are not rational, and science and the scientific method cannot address them, but they still occur. Like, your Aunt Mildred won’t get on a flight to Los Angeles because she has a premonition. The plane crashes. She even had a sense of the terrain in which it would crash. You can’t explain that scientifically, and yet it happens. Or little Freddy has cancer and all of modern medicine can’t heal him. The Sisters of Perpetual Prayer get together and lay their hands over him and he’s healed. Explain that. And it’s time the word irrational lost its pejorative connotation.”

  “Just so,” said Magritte. “But now, like I say, you’re speaking of spirituality and metaphysics.”

  The bearded man said, “That can all be explained by coincidence.”

  “Now I would argue with the fundamentalists that you are refusing to observe that which is right in front of you,” Magritte replied.

  The bearded man asked, “You having visions again, Magritte? Maybe you had a few drinks with the departed spirit of George Dishey last night or something?”

  Magritte grinned, a kind of stretching of his lips over peg-shaped teeth. “Yeah, good old George. He liked to play with reality a bit, didn’t he?”

  No one replied.

  Magritte said, “Now, there’s something no one wants to talk about, our dear departed heretic, George. He bent the truth a bit, and we were all too chickenshit to say so in so many words. Too bad George isn’t with us today; Dan could maybe rub his nose in the facts once and for all. But then, he wouldn’t have showed, and that would have really frosted us.”

  John said reasonably, “We asked him to debate Dan in public, but he wouldn’t.”

  “Yeah,” said Magritte, “he played with our minds by accepting date after date and then never showed up. No ‘Sorry,’ no ‘I got a hangnail,’ just no George. For that and a thousand other dodges, we all despised him. But we wouldn’t say so, wouldn’t publicly rip the buttons off his uniform and drum him out of the corps.”