Tyrannosaur Canyon (17 page)

“Go on.”

"Strange thing happened about a year and a half ago. Seems the family went off to Central America on some kind of extended vacation. Father died down there, kids came back with a fourth brother, half Indian. The four of them divided up about six hundred million."

Willer raised his eyebrows. "Any suspicion of foul play down there?"

"Nothing definite. But the whole story's confused, nobody seems to know anything, it's all rumors. His old mansion is occupied by his Indian son, a guy who writes inspirational books, New Age stuff. They say he has tribal tattoos.

"Broadbent lives modestly, works hard. Married last year, wife's name is Sally, born Sally Colorado. Comes from a working-class background. Broadbent runs a large-animal vet clinic up in Abiquiii with an assistant, Albert McBride-calls himself Shane."

Wilier rolled his eyes.

"I talked to some of his clients and he's equally respected among both the fancy-horse crowd and the old-time ranchers. Wife gives horse-riding lessons to kids."

"Record?"

"Other than a few minor scrapes as a juvenile, the guy's clean."

"McBride?"

"Clean too."

"Tell me about these 'minor scrapes.'"

"Records are sealed but you know how that is. Let's see ... A dumb prank involving a truckload of manure and the high school principal. . ." He flipped through some papers. "Went for a joyride on somebody else's horse . . . broke a guy's nose in a fight."

"The other brothers?"

"Philip, lives in New York City, curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, nothing unusual there. Vernon, just married an environmental lawyer, lives in
Connecticut
as a house husband, stays at home with the baby while the wife goes to work. Got into a couple of financial scrapes a while ago but nothing since the inheritance."

"How much they get?"

"It seems they each got about ninety million after taxes."

Wilier pursed his lips. "Kind of makes you wonder-whatever it is that guy is looking for in the high mesas, it can't be just about money, right?"

"I don't know, Lieutenant. You see these CEOs with hundreds of millions risking prison for a few thousand more. It's a disease."

"True." Wilier nodded, surprised at Hernandez's insight. "It's just that this Broadbent doesn't seem like the type. He doesn't flash around his money. He works even though he doesn't need to. I mean, here's a guy who'll get up at two in the morning to stick his arm up a cow's ass and make forty bucks. There's a piece missing here, Hernandez."

"You got that right."

"What news on the stiff?"

"No ID yet. It's in the works, dental records, fingerprints. It's going to take a while to work it all through the system."

"The monk? You follow up on him?"

"Yeah. He's got quite a background. Son of Admiral John Mortimer Ford, Under-Secretary of the Navy in the Eisenhower administration. Andover, Harvard, undergraduate major in anthropology, summa cum laude. Went to MIT and pulled down a Ph.D. in cybernetics, whatever the hell that is. Met his wife, got married, both of them joined the CIA-and then nada, just like you said earlier. Those guys are serious about keeping a lid on their own. He did some kind of cloak-and-dagger work with code breaking and computers, wife was murdered in Cambodia. He up and quit to become a monk. The guy just walked away from everything, including a million-dollar house, bank accounts up the wazoo, a garage full of antique Jaguars. .. Unbelievable."

Wilier grunted. It just wasn't coming together. He wondered if his suspicions of Broadbent and the monk were justified-they had all the attributes of the straight and narrow. Yet he was sure that somehow, some way, they were in it up to their eyeballs.

11

IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON
 
by the time Tom drove into the parking lot of the Silver

Strike Mall, located in a sea of shabby sprawl on the outskirts of Tucson. He parked his rental car and headed across the sticky asphalt to the mall entrance. Inside, it was air-conditioned to just above arctic conditions. The Fossil Connection was at the unfashionable far end of the mall, where Tom found a surprisingly modest storefront, with a few fossils on display in a window that was mosdy whitewashed out. A sign on the door announced: "Wholesale Only. No Walk-Ins."

The door was locked. He buzzed, the door clicked, and he stepped in.

It looked more like a law office than one of the largest fossil wholesalers in the West. The place was carpeted in beige, with inspirational posters on the walls about entrepreneurship and customer service. Two secretaries worked at desks flanking each side of a waiting area with a couple of taupe chairs and a glass and chrome table. Some fossils decorated a shelf on one side and a large ammonite sat in the middle of the coffee table, along with a stack of fossil magazines and brochures advertising the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show.

One of the secretaries looked up, took in his two-thousand-dollar Valentino suit and handmade shoes, and gave an ostentatious raise of her eyebrows. "May I help you, sir?"

"I have an appointment with Robert Beezon."

"Name?"

"Broadbent."

"Please have a seat, Mr. Broadbent. Can I get you anything to drink? Coffee? Tea? Mineral water?"

"No, thank you."

Tom sat, picked up a magazine, nipped through it. He felt a twinge of antici-

pation thinking about the deception he had planned. The suit had been sitting in his closet, along with a dozen others he never wore, bought for him by his father in Florence and London.

A moment later the phone on the secretary's desk chimed. "Mr. Beezon will see you now." She nodded toward a door with a frosted glass window that said, simply, BEEZON.

Tom rose as the door opened, framing a heavyset man with a combover, in shirtsleeves and a tie. He looked indistinguishable from an overworked, smalltown lawyer.

"Mr. Broadbent?" He held out his hand.

The office itself finally betrayed that the man's business was not accounting or law. There were posters on the walls of fossil specimens, and a glass case contained an array of fossilized crabs, jellyfish, spiders-and in the center a curious fossil plaque containing a fossil fish, with a fish in its belly, which in turn had a minnow in its belly.

Tom sat in a chair and Beezon took a seat behind his desk.

"You like my little gem? It reminds me that it's a fish-eat-fish world."

Tom gave the obligatory chuckle to what was obviously Beezon's standard opening line.

"XT'
    
»

Nice.

"Now, Mr. Broadbent," Beezon went on, "I haven't had the pleasure of working with you before. Are you new to the business? Do you have a shop?"

"I'm a wholesaler."

"We sell to a lot of wholesalers. But it's odd I haven't run into you before. We're a rather small club, you know."

"I'm just getting into the business."

Beezon folded his hands on the desk and looked at Tom, his eyes flickering up and down his suit. "Card?"

"Don't carry one."

"Well then, what can I do for you, Mr. Broadbent?" He cocked his head, as if awaiting an explanation.

I was hoping to see some samples."

"I'll give you the cook's tour 'round the back."

"Great."

Beezon heaved up from his desk, and Tom followed him through the office suite to an unassuming door in the back. He unlocked it and they stepped into a room as cavernous as a Sam's Club, but instead of merchandise the metal shelves were heaped with fossils, thousands, maybe even millions of them. Here and

there, men and women drove about with forklifts or hand-pushed flatbed carts loaded with rocks. A smell of stone dust drifted in the air.

"It used to be a Dillard's," said Beezon, "but this end of the mall never seemed to work for retail, so we got it at a good price. It's a warehouse, showroom, and pick-and-pack operation all rolled up into one. The raw stuff comes in one end, the finished stuff goes out the other."

He took Tom's elbow and led him forward, waving his hand along a wall against which leaned gigantic slabs of buff-colored rock, braced with two-by-fours, padded and shrink-wrapped. "We just got some excellent material from Green River, super stuff, you can buy it from me by the square yard, split and break it down and sell it by the fish, quintuple your money."

They came to bins heaped with fossils that Tom recognized as ammonites.

"We're the largest dealer of ammonites in the world, polished or rough, in matrix or no, sell by weight or by number, prepared or unprepared." He kept walking, passing shelf after shelf covered with boxes of the curious-looking curled-up ammonite shells. He paused, reached into one box, pulled one out. "These are pretty basic at a two bucks the pound unprepared, still in matrix. Got some over there with pyrites, and over here some really nice agatized specimens. Those cost

more.

He walked on. "If you're interested in insects, I just got some beaut spiders from the Nkomi Shales of Namibia. New shipment of crabs from Heinigen, Germany-those are hot these days, they're getting two, three hundred dollars apiece. Agatized wood-sell that by the pound. Great for tumbling. Crinoids, concretions with ferns. Coprolites-kids love 'em. We got it all-and no one can beat our prices."

Tom followed. At one point Beezon stopped, pulled out a concretion. "Lot of these haven't even been split. You can sell them that way, let the customer split them. The kids'll buy three or four. Usually there's a fern or leaf inside. Once in a while a bone or jaw-I've heard of mammal skulls even being found in some. It's like gambling. Here-"

He handed Tom a concretion, and then he swiped a rock hammer off an anvil. "Go ahead-split it."

Tom took the hammer and, remembering his cover, fumbled with it a bit before placing the fossil on the anvil.

"Use the chisel end," said Beezon quietly.

"Right, of course." Tom turned the hammer around and gave the concretion a whack. It split open, revealing the single leaf of a fossilized fern.

He found Beezon eyeing him thoughtfully.

"What do you have as far as, er, higher-end material goes?" Tom asked.

Beezon went silently to a locked metal door and led him into a smaller, win-dowless room. "This is where we keep the good stuff-vertebrate fossils in here, mammoth ivory, dinosaur eggs. In fact, I just got a new shipment of hadrosaur eggs from
Hunan
, at least sixty percent of the shell intact. I'm letting them go at one-fifty apiece. You can get four, five hundred for them." He unlocked a cabinet, hefted a stone egg out of a nest of crumpled newspaper, held it up. Tom took it, looked it over, gave it back, then fussily dusted off his hand with a silk handkerchief pulled out of his pocket. The little move did not escape Beezon's notice.

"Minimum order a dozen." He moved on, coming to a long, coffin-shaped metal box, unlocked it to reveal an irregular plaster lump about four feet by three. "Here's something really sweet, a Struthiomimus, forty percent complete, lacking the skull. Just came in from
South Dakota
. Legal, strictly legal, came from a private ranch. Still jacketed and in matrix, needs preparation."

He gave Tom a rather pointed look. "Everything we deal in here is legal, with signed and notarized documents from the private land owner." He paused. "Just what are you after, Mr. Broadbent?" He was not smiling now.

"Just what I said." The encounter was going exactly as he had hoped: he had aroused Beezon's suspicions.

Beezon leaned forward and said in a low voice. "You're no fossil dealer." His eyes flicked over the suit again. "What are you, a fed?"

Tom shook his head, putting on a sheepish, guilty smile. "You smoked me out, Mr. Beezon. Congratulations. You're right, I'm no fossil dealer. But I'm also no fed."

Beezon continued to gaze at him, all his western friendliness gone. "What are you then?"

"I'm an investment banker."

"What the hell do you want with me?"

"I work with a small and exclusive clientele in the Far East-Singapore and South Korea. We invest our clients' money. Sometimes our clients seek eccentric investments-old master paintings, gold mines, racehorses, French wines . . ." Tom paused, and then added, "Dinosaurs."

There was a long silence. Then Beezon echoed, "Dinosaurs?"

Tom nodded. "I guess I didn't cut a convincing figure as a fossil dealer."

Some of Beezon's friendliness returned, combined with a look of a man taking satisfaction in not having been fooled. "No, you didn't. First of all, there was that fancy suit. And then as soon as you held that rock hammer I knew you were

no fossil dealer." He chuckled. "So, Mr. Broadbent, who is this client of yours and what kind of dinosaur is he in the market for?"

"May we speak freely?"

"Naturally."

"His name is Mr. Kim, and he is a successful industrialist from South Korea."

"This Struthiomimus here is a pretty good deal, at one hundred and twenty thousand-"

"My client is not interested in junk." Tom had shifted his tone, and he hoped the new persona of crisp, arrogant investment banker would be convincing.

Beezon lost his smile. "This is not junk."

"My client runs a multibillion-dollar industrial empire in South Korea. The last hostile takeover he launched resulted in the suicide of the CEO on the other side, an occurrence which Mr. Kim did not find displeasing. It's a Darwinian world my client inhabits. He wants a dinosaur for the corporate headquarters that will make a statement about who he is and how he does business."

There was a long silence. Then Beezon asked, "And just what kind of dinosaur might that be?"

Tom stretched his lips in a smile. "What else-but a T. Rex?"

Beezon gave a nervous laugh. "I see. Surely you're aware that there are only thirteen tyrannosaur skeletons in the world and every single one is in a museum. The last one that came up for sale went for eight and a half million. We're not talking chump change."

"And I am also aware that there may be one or two others for sale-quietly."