Jurassic Heart (7 page)

Saying nothing, he paused for a moment, then acquiesced, climbed back in his car, and drove off. I watched his car as it followed each of the cutbacks along the hill, wondering if it was coincidence he’d turned up such a short time after Eric had been beaten up. For some reason, I had a feeling this wasn’t the last I’d see of Hunter Joseph.

T
HAT
NIGHT
I set up a campfire, hoping the combination of food, whiskey, and crackly heat would help my new team to bond. I hadn’t had much chance to talk to the two grad students, Andre and Pete, and from my previous experiences working with River and Raven, I knew they wouldn’t settle into a group unless they were forced to.

I’d put Boner in charge of the fire, and he’d done well, building it high and setting logs around it for people to sit on. As the night grew colder, we all edged in closer and closer until our shoulders were hunched up tightly to squeeze everyone in. The bottle of whiskey made another loop around the circle and Raven passed; she was more interested in extracting her marshmallow from the end of a long sharpened stick.

“What were you two like as kids?” I asked River.

She threw back a mouthful of whiskey, shuddered, and laughed. “Vile,” she said.

“You grew up in New York, right?” Boner asked.

“How did you know that?”

“There’s no way you could be so cool and disaffected unless you grew up in New York.”

She laughed again. “Yeah, but you’re thinking of the wrong sort of New York City kid.”

“We didn’t get to be cool and disaffected until we were teenagers,” Raven said around the marshmallow that was sticking her teeth together.

“When we were little, we were musical theater brats.”

“No way,” Boner said.

“Way.”

“Broadway musical theater brats?” I asked.

River rolled her eyes and tucked a strand of her long inky hair back into its braid. “Yeah. Shit, we did loads of stuff. We played Tallulah in
Bugsy Malone
for six months. That ran right in the middle of Times Square.”

“They liked the fact that we were twins,” Raven added. “It meant they could swap us each night, and we could do twice as many performances as the rest of the kids. They were always circulating casts, but we stayed in until we got taller than the kid playing Bugsy. Then they kicked us out.”

“Harsh world, show business,” Boner said. I got the impression he was joking, but the girls nodded solemnly.

“It really fucking is,” River said. “People think, oh, they’ve got this privileged life. And we didn’t. We were at school five days a week and spent all our weekends either performing or taking dance classes. If I hadn’t gotten into science in high school, I was going to try out for the American Youth Ballet.”

“The arts’ loss is science’s gain,” I told her solemnly.

She snorted and gave me the finger.

“One of my cousins is a percussionist,” Pete said, leaning in toward the fire so his voice would carry across the circle. “He works at the ballet in Boston.”

“That’s cool,” River said with a grin.

“Do you miss it? Performing, I mean,” he asked.

River winced. “I don’t know. I miss the camaraderie among dancers, especially the girls in the corps. I think science is a lot more isolated.”

Pete nodded solemnly. “Except in situations like this.”

“Yeah, but even here everyone works on their own and shares the results. That’s different from working for hours and hours with twenty other girls to make sure all of your movements are precisely in sync.”

“Would you ever go back to it?”

She shook her head emphatically. “No way. I’m too old now. You get some freaks who dance into their forties, but most of us get injured and drop out way before that. Youth and beauty is everything in the world of showbiz.”

I listened to their conversation with interest, feeling like I was finally starting to get to know Pete better. He was quiet and always polite, and he did come to me with questions every now and then. Most of the time, though, he was content to work on his own.

I guessed he was about twenty-seven, maybe twenty-eight, slim, with dark ginger hair that was cut close to his head, skin liberally dusted with freckles. He was always piling sunscreen on his arms and nose when he was working outside. I figured he must burn easily.

Andre was another character again. He’d worked with Pete several times before, so I wasn’t surprised when they set up next to each other. After careful observation, I’d decided that while Pete’s quietness came from being a little shy and possibly intimidated, Andre seemed more reflective and astute. I hadn’t quite figured out his personality, and the social setting hadn’t revealed anything new about his character. He hung back from the group, accepting the bottle of whiskey when it passed him, talking in low tones with Brad.

Boner laughed at something, breaking my concentration, and leaned into my side, tipping his head to murmur into my ear.

“What do you think of Joseph?”

I rolled my eyes. “A pain in the ass,” I said bluntly. “He doesn’t have anything new, just the same old blah blah, save the planet, blah blah.”

“You’d think he’d be bored with that by now.”

“Apparently not. He wasn’t here for me, though. I don’t know whether to be offended or not.”

“What do you mean?” Boner asked, and then it clicked. “Ah. Eric.”

“Yeah. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s been following Eric around, hassling him with threats of the authorities and stuff. It seems like the sort of thing he’d do—make more trouble with the amateurs rather than the universities.”

“Or us.”

“Yeah. Interesting how he turned up just after Eric got put in the hospital, though, don’t you think?”

“Do you really think Hunter Joseph
would do something like that? He seems a bit too goody-two-shoes to me.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s something to think about, though.”

We turned back to the campfire, and I hoped no one had overheard our conversation. I didn’t want my accusations to get back to Joseph, especially when I had no evidence. It seemed every day one more thing to worry about landed in my lap. It made me nervous about tomorrow.

W
ITH
R
IVER
running the lab, I could finally get back out to my little corner of the dig and work in the mud again. With the team divided up in a much more logical order, I could take over where I left off, satisfied that no one would have done any damage to the partially excavated skeleton.

I had forgotten what a strict ringmaster River could be when given any position of authority. In my own defense, I didn’t remember putting River in a position of authority, but she seemed to have taken my request for her to set up base camp as an instruction to organize my life.

At one in the afternoon, she appeared with a whistle and announced lunch break.

The whistle shocked me. I worked with no radio or music playing—unlike a lot of my colleagues, I found it a distraction. I looked over at Raven, who met my gaze, rolled her eyes, and hoisted herself out of her trench.

“Does she do that a lot?” I asked.

“Unfortunately,” Raven said drily. “And you wondered why we don’t work together anymore?”

I laughed and slung my arm around her shoulders as we walked up to base camp.

“Got anything good?”

“Another small rodent, I think,” she said. “Post-Cretaceous, but I’ve got dirt samples for River to confirm.”

“Good work,” I said, and it was. She’d only been on-site for a few days, and a discovery this early on was promising. For all the negative press I’d been giving Eric White, he seemed to have picked a good spot for digging.

We were far enough out of town to make it not worth driving in every day at lunch; it took too long. Instead, most people brought a packed lunch, and we sat outside to eat, enjoying the good weather while we could.

It sort of felt like the old days when we were students. Well, Boner and I were students before River and Raven; they were undergrads while we were grad students. It was how we all met. And Pete and Andre were technically still at school, and Nancy and Chuck hadn’t been in school in a long time.

The atmosphere among the team was more like the lightness that comes from having no responsibility, even though we actually had quite a lot to be responsible for. We could fuck around and have a laugh and tease each other about stupid things like avocado sandwiches (seriously, who in their right mind would put avocado in a sandwich? Even though River insisted it was a seeded baguette).

I stole some of Boner’s chips, so he took a huge handful of mine and we argued about who owed what to whom. Then someone suggested we just fuck each other and be done with it. Boner snickered and elbowed me in the ribs.

“Yeah, Nick, why don’t you just let me fuck you and be done with it?”

I stuck my tongue out at him. “Because I don’t want to.”

“I’m sure that’s not true,” River said, leaning in from my other side and grinning like she knew something. Which she didn’t, of course, but she’d been around in the early days when Boner and I had hooked up, mostly when we were drunk.

“When you’ve all stopped arguing over my sex life,” I said, standing and brushing off my jeans, “we need to get back to work.”

People drifted back to the site in twos and threes, and I stayed behind to check on the lab results. That was the only reason why I spotted the TV news crew in our parking lot when I emerged an hour later.

I was curious enough to sneak down the side of the road, knowing I could approach from this angle without anyone spotting me. It didn’t take long for me to find Hunter Joseph in the middle of the small crowd of people: him, a small blonde woman in a tailored blue suit, and a few guys with pieces of equipment. I could have gone over to them, demanded what they were up to, insisted they move on. Or I could stay just out of their line of sight and watch. And listen.

He was dressed smarter than before, in a pressed white shirt and jeans, the shirt unbuttoned at the collar to show off his throat and a good inch or so of chest. He was fucking handsome. There was no use in denying that. In the midafternoon sunlight, his black hair was shiny and loose around his shoulders, and his dark-brown eyes smoldered as he laughed at something the woman said.

I guessed the woman in the suit was the reporter—she fussed with her hair and makeup for a minute while the crew seemed to be figuring out a way of getting both her and Joseph in a close-up shot together. She was shorter than him by at least a foot and a half; she barely came up to his shoulder. In the end, someone turned over a box and she stood on that, laughing and flirting with Joseph as he offered his hand to steady her.

After a few minutes, the action seemed to intensify; I was close enough to hear the whole thing. And all I could do was watch helplessly as he decimated our work one point at a time.

“I’m not denying that the work these paleontologists are doing is important,” he said. “We just have to weigh the possible gains from it against the risks to the environment.”

“What sort of risks are we talking about?” the blonde, coiffed reporter asked.

“To the wildlife, first of all,” Joseph said. “There are animals that use this area to make their homes or hunt. Our research has shown that once disturbed by humans, those animals are unlikely to return to the area for some time. They are driven away to find new places to live, possibly forever. That’s a loss for local people and to the delicate ecosystem that thrives here.”

The reporter nodded solemnly. “What else?”

“The paleontologists are working very close to the edge of the woodland area. Some of these trees are hundreds, even thousands of years old. At this time, as I understand it, no trees have been taken down. But what if they suddenly discover a T. rex? Do you think they would hesitate in felling those trees in order to excavate that skeleton?”

“Well, we can see the dig here is causing some friction between the two groups of scientists,” the reporter said as she turned back to the camera. “While we wait to hear what else comes out of this exciting dig, the risks surrounding this sort of activity are becoming ever more clear. More on this story as we get it. Back to you in the studio.”

I was furious, the red haze masking my ability to think logically. This was sabotage, plain and simple.

The film crew seemed happy with the footage and were packing up. The reporter in her prim suit was already climbing into a car, letting the crew finish the heavy lifting, moving the equipment back into the van. From where I was standing, it looked like Joseph was talking to a director or a producer; they exchanged a few words, a handshake, and Joseph went back to his car.

A few minutes later, they’d all driven away, leaving me to try to figure out what the fuck I was going to do.

It was only a few minutes’ walk back to the site, and I simultaneously thought and fumed as I stomped the distance away. I’d have to contact Sam; he’d probably get a call anyway, but this was his job, to deal with the press.

The news segment ran that night. Boner and I made sure we were alone in the motel room so I could watch it and get all of my ranting anger out before we went back to work. Being my best friend meant Boner sat and took all the vitriol, then called Sam for me and let us rant at each other for thirty minutes or so. I wasn’t sure I felt better after, but it was good knowing we’d gotten it all out.