Murder on the Silk Road (16 page)

Charlotte reached out to touch the bone, which looked like a leg bone of some kind. “What’s this?” she asked. It was incised with Chinese ideographs that had been filled in with black ink to make them stand out.

Picking it up, Lisa turned it over in her hands. “It’s a dragon bone,” she said. “They’re dinosaur bones—this looks like the femur of a duckbill to me—which were used by ancient soothsayers for divination. Here are the readings.” She pointed to the ideographs. “They’re from the
I Ching
.”

“No kidding!” Charlotte exclaimed.

“The bones were heated, which would cause cracks to appear,” Lisa explained. “The fortune was revealed by the pattern of the cracks.” Handing it to Charlotte, she added: “Someone probably brought it to Larry. It’s amazing what turns up when you put the word out that you’ll pay cash for old bones.”

“It’s beautiful,” said Charlotte, running her finger over the polished ivory surface. The patterns created by the ancient calligraphy reminded her of the ornamentation on a fine piece of antique scrimshaw.

Lisa had returned her attention to the map. “Look at all these localities! It looks as if the site really
is
paved with fossils.” She began counting the localities, each of which was marked with a red dot and numbered. “Thirty-seven in just a few days’ work.”

“The problem is, which is the one we’re looking for?”

“I think I’ve got it,” Charlotte said. “Presumably Larry numbered the localities consecutively as he went along, which would mean that the highest numbers should correspond to the most recently discovered ones.”

“Of course! The one we’re looking for would be here,” said Lisa, pointing to the grid that included localities thirty-four through thirty-seven. “Unless he hadn’t gotten around to marking Thursday’s localities on the map.”

“We can check that too,” said Charlotte. Lifting the map, she pulled the field diary out from underneath. “Look,” she said, pointing to the entry for Wednesday. “Here are thirty-one, thirty-two, and thirty-three.”

“Which means that he was working on thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six, and thirty-seven on Thursday, and that one of those is the one we want,” added Lisa. She returned her attention to the map.

“Can you tell where they are?” asked Charlotte.

“They’re to the south of here; it looks like about three hundred yards,” Lisa replied. “On the north slope of a ravine, about halfway up.” She looked up at Charlotte. “Shall we check it out?”

Charlotte smiled. “I don’t see why not.”

Unlike the walk out from the guest house, the going to the south of the camp was treacherous. The terrain was a wild expanse of badlands eroded by ancient rainfall into ravines and gullies interspersed with bluffs, ridges, and buttes. There was no way to go directly from point A to point B. Their way was blocked at every turn by outcroppings that jutted into the sky, or by huge rounded boulders that cascaded down the slopes. Although the terrain was desolate, it had a stark kind of beauty. At this time of day it was a study in contrasts: the pink and lavender bands of sediment on the walls of the ridges contrasted with the brilliant blue of the sky; the deep shadows cast by the gullies and ravines contrasted with the glowing red of the summits, which had caught the rays of the declining sun; and dark cloud shadows glided effortlessly across rough surfaces of purplish-red sandstone.

Lisa led the way. She had a long, lanky frame, and the easy, swinging stride of someone who was accustomed to walking. Like Bert and Dogie, she walked with her eyes focused on the ground, looking for fossils. But it didn’t take a practiced eye to find them. Even for Charlotte, they were easy to spot. The fragments of white bone were everywhere. They seemed to ooze out of the purplish-red earth like bones in a horror-story graveyard. The twenty-foot-square sections represented by the grids on the master map had been marked off with strings and stakes, and each locality had been marked with a number painted in red on a nearby rock. As they walked on, it became clear that Larry had chosen only the best of the localities to mark—the most complete, most readily accessible, and the most well-preserved. Hundreds of unmarked fossil fragments lay scattered around on the ground. Fossils that might have been treasures at a less productive site were worthless here, Lisa observed.

Charlotte was reminded of the legend on Dogie’s T-shirt:
So many dinosaurs, so little time
. “Dogie would be calling for a lot of
pijiu
if he were here this afternoon,” she observed.

“He’d have to bring in a whole keg,” Lisa agreed as she squatted down for the umpteenth time to examine a large skeleton. “Larry was right. It’s a fossil-hunter’s paradise out here. I’ve never seen anything like it. Here’s a duckbill,” she said, “complete except for the skull.”

“What happened to the skull?”

“Probably carried off by a carnivore. They liked the skulls; they were the tastiest part. Bert calls it Rogers’ Law of Fossil-Hunting: the skull of the best specimens is never preserved. Unfortunately, it’s the anatomy of the skull that tells us the most about how dinosaurs are related to one another.”

As they went along, Lisa talked about the stratigraphy of the site. The strata were undisturbed, she said, which meant that the ground hadn’t been disturbed by seismic activity or by ancient erosion, and therefore that the history of the landscape was clearly revealed by the patterns of the strata.

“Here,” said Lisa, handing Charlotte the binoculars and pointing to the flank of a nearby butte that was lined with stripes of pale greenish-gray, soft orange-pink, and glowing golden ochre. “The K/T boundary layer is the dark narrow band that you see sandwiched between the layers of sandstone.”

Charlotte studied the dark layer that ran evenly through the rock like a layer of chocolate filling in a vanilla layer cake.

“The dark band is actually a seam of low-grade coal called lignite. It was formed from the soot that blanketed the earth as a result of the devastating wild fires that broke out after the catastrophe,” Lisa explained.

“I thought you didn’t believe in the catastrophe theory,” said Charlotte as she handed back the binoculars.

“I don’t. Or rather, we don’t. But that’s not to say that a catastrophe didn’t occur. We just don’t think that it was the sole cause of the dinosaurs’ extinction. A factor, maybe, along with other factors such as overpopulation, disease, falling sea levels, cooling climate, deforestation, competition from mammals—you name it. There are a million possibilities.”

“Which do you subscribe to?”

“All of the above, and a few more. I think the dinosaurs died out gradually from a combination of converging environmental factors, all of them mundane. That’s the trouble with the gradualism theory—it lacks the pizazz that the catastrophe theory has.”

“In other words, whatever could go wrong, did.”

“Yes, and all at the same time,” said Lisa. “Well, within a few million years, anyway. Which amounts to the same time, geologically speaking.”

They paused at the crest of a ridge overlooking a steep ravine. Taking a seat at the base of a giant boulder, they gazed out over the landscape. Though it had cooled off considerably since midday, the boulder still retained the heat, and leaning against it was like leaning against a warm radiator.

Charlotte removed her coolie hat and let the breeze that had come up as the day had waned play over her burning temples.

Below, a plump mother sand grouse led her brood across a patch of ochre-colored sand that had collected in a low-lying area at the foot of the ridge. She looked like a cross between a pigeon and a partridge, but her walk was more ungainly than either one.

“Their toes are padded like a camel’s so that they can walk in the sand,” said Lisa, who was also looking at the grouse.

“They remind me of Larry,” said Charlotte. “He was telling us at dinner that night about his last meal; it was sand grouse, or rather,
Tétras au vin à la Dijonnaise
.” As she spoke, she reminded herself that she should track down Larry’s cook and ask him some questions.

“Ah, yes,” said Lisa. “Eat well, dress well, sleep well. Well, I guess those days are gone.” She sat with her long legs stretched out in front of her. Like the sand grouse, she was also shod for the terrain—heavy boots of the type usually worn by lumberjacks or construction workers.

Charlotte coveted them. If she kept up these hikes in the badlands, her sneakers were going to be torn to ribbons.

“As near as I can tell, localities thirty-four to thirty-seven must be on the far side of the next ridge,” Lisa said, pointing at the ridge that paralleled the ravine below them on the opposite side.

It took about fifteen minutes for them to clamber down one slope and back up the other, and another ten to climb to the top of the next ridge. Thirty-four was near the top. Exposed to view was the skeleton of a small horned dinosaur with a long name, a relative of
Protoceratops
. Lisa pronounced it a very nice find.

The next locality was partly concealed by an outcropping. But once they had scrambled down the slope to get a better look, even Charlotte could see that this was Larry’s “find.” It looked as if the hand of God had laid out a box of giant Lincoln logs in a dinosaur pattern on the purplish-red slope.

“Holy shit,” said Lisa as she caught site of the skeleton. Grabbing Charlotte’s arm, she just stood there, muttering the phrase over and over again. It was an incantation: “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.”

“What is it?” asked Charlotte. It was clear that it was that rarity that Lisa had spoken of—a fully articulated skeleton—and it was obvious that it was huge, but beyond that Charlotte had no idea what it could be.

With Charlotte in tow, Lisa slowly drew nearer, all the time staring at the enormous mass of bones and muttering “Holy shit.”

The skeleton was as long as a city bus. The tail alone must have been twenty feet. It stretched across the hillside, each vertebra the size of a turkey platter. The four-foot thigh bone reminded Charlotte of the line from
Ozymandias
about the “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” in the desert.

Lisa still wasn’t talking. Her bulging jaw hinges were moving up and down like a mute trying to utter a word that wouldn’t come out.

“What is it?” Charlotte asked again.

“A
T. rex
,” she finally replied as she removed her camera from its case. “Virtually complete, except for the skull. Every piece in the right place.
T. rex
on the half shell.” Moving closer, she circled the skeleton, taking a series of shots from various angles.

Looking out over the long tail, Charlotte noticed the narrow band of black that marked the K/T boundary layer snaking through the far wall of the ravine. Then she suddenly realized that it was
below
where they were standing. “It’s above the K/T boundary layer!”

Lisa nodded. “By about five hundred feet. There’s absolutely no doubt that this is Tertiary strata,” she said. “Our reptilian friend here might as well be wearing a T-shirt that says ‘I Survived the Death Star.’”

For once, Larry hadn’t been exaggerating. Not only was it the biggest find of the century, with the possible exception of Andrews’ discovery of the dinosaur eggs, it was, according to Lisa, probably the biggest find of all time: a nearly complete
T. rex
. Apart from the skull, only a few foot bones were missing, and they might yet turn up somewhere nearby. Not only that, it was above the K/T boundary layer. The chance that a nearly complete skeleton could have been churned up from older sediments and redeposited above the K/T boundary layer with each bone in its proper place was nil. Larry’s discovery of the
T. rex
was irrefutable proof that the gradualists were right. It was also a good bet that it was the reason for his murder. At the moment, Charlotte’s chief suspect was Orecchio, who wouldn’t have wanted to see the theory on which he had staked his professional reputation invalidated. But there were a number of problems with Orecchio as a suspect.

Theoretically, Orecchio murdered Larry to destroy the evidence that refuted his theory, hence the missing page in the field log. But it seemed to Charlotte that there was a good chance that some other member of the expedition would eventually have discovered the
T. rex
skeleton, if not this year, then next. In which case the murder would have been pointless. But Lisa thought otherwise. She agreed that there was a chance, but it was a slim one. Finding dinosaur fossils wasn’t an exact science, she said. It required a practiced eye, a nose for fossils, and a great deal of luck.

“It’s easy to miss a fossil,” she told Charlotte as they headed back to the guest house. “Sometimes it’s just a glint of bone or an outline in the rock. If your mind is on something else, or if the light’s wrong, or if you’re looking in the other direction, you can miss it.”

“But this was more than a glint of bone,” said Charlotte.

“Yes, but it was also hidden underneath that outcropping. Someone else might have been five feet away and still not have seen it. As for next year—it might not be there next year. All it takes is one big sandstorm, and it’s buried for another couple of million years.”

“What about elsewhere?” asked Charlotte. “If Larry found a fully articulated skeleton in Tertiary strata, isn’t it likely that another one would turn up somewhere else in the world?”

“Possible, but not likely,” Lisa said. “At least, not in Orecchio’s lifetime. And he probably doesn’t care what happens after he’s dead, as long as he’s succeeded in preserving his scientific reputation while he’s alive.”

They arrived back at the guest house at about seven-thirty, dirty and sweaty. As Charlotte was washing up for dinner, she thought about her conversation with Lisa. If Larry’s murder was going to be pinned on a member of the expedition, Lisa obviously wanted it to be pinned on Orecchio. But there was another motive for killing Larry that Lisa hadn’t brought up, perhaps because the idea was so distasteful to her. Larry might have been murdered by someone who wanted to stake his own claim to the
T. rex
skeleton. The person who discovered the
T. rex
would go down in the annals of paleontology, just as Andrews had for his dinosaur eggs. Was a reputation in the pages of the history books worth the risk of murder? Charlotte thought it was. And for this motive, there were any number of suspects: Bouchard, who had the advantage of proximity; Peng, who may have wanted to claim the find for the Chinese; and even Bert and/or Dogie. She would have to find out what all of them had been doing between the time when Larry had left the compound and the time when she had found him dead. No doubt they would all claim to have spent most of that time in bed, which would leave her exactly nowhere, but she felt as if she should go through the exercise of inquiring anyway.