Read Tyrannosaur Canyon Online
Authors: Douglas Preston
Tyrannosaur Canyon (23 page)
3
WILLER GLANCED UP at the clock from a stack of paperwork. Nine-fifteen. He looked over at Hernandez, who looked almost green in the sickly fluorescent glare of the office.
"He blew us off," said Hernandez. "Just like that."
"Just like that. . ." Wilier rapped his pen on the stack of papers. It didn't make sense, a guy with so much to lose. Guys like that had a million legal ways of avoiding an interview with the police.
"You think he's jumped the rez?"
"His vehicle-that classic Chevy he drives-was parked at the airport. His plane landed at eight and now it's gone."
Hernandez shrugged. "Engine trouble?"
"He's playing some kind of game with us."
"What's he up to?"
"Hell if I know."
The room became heavy with silence. Wilier finally coughed, lit up, felt he needed to do something to reestablish his authority; it surprised and galled him that Broadbent would simply blow him off. "Here's what we know for a fact: there's fresh blood on his living-room rug and a fresh round in his wall. He missed an interview with the police. Maybe he's in trouble or dead. Maybe he's running scared. Maybe he argued with his wife, things got out of hand ... and now she's buried in the back forty. Maybe he's just an arrogant bastard who thinks we don't rate. It doesn't matter: we got to track his ass down."
"Right."
"I want an all points for northern
border, 1-25 at Belen, and one at Cuba State Police Headquarters on Highway 44." He paused, shuffling through some papers on his desk, pulled one out. "Here it is: he's driving a '57 Chevrolet 3100 pickup, turquoise and white, NM license plate 346 EWE. We got one thing going for us: driving a truck like that, he'll stick out like a sore thumb."
4
MADDOM PARKED THE Range Rover in front of the Sunrise Liquor Mart and checked his watch.
. A half-dozen beer advertisements in the plate-glass window threw a confusion of neon light onto the dusty hood of his car. Save for the guy behind the counter it was empty. The moon had not yet risen. He knew, from earlier research, he would see the headlights of a southbound car two minutes and forty seconds before it passed.
He got out, shoved his hands in his pockets, leaned on the car, drew in a deep breath of cool desert air, closed his eyes, murmured his mantra, and managed to get his heart rate down to something a little more normal. He opened his eyes. The highway was still dark.
. He had passed Broadbent in his '57 Chevy eleven minutes ago, and if the man followed directions, turned around quickly, and maintained his speed, his headlights should appear in the north in just over six minutes.
He walked into the convenience store, bought a slice of ten-hour-old pizza and a giant cup of burnt coffee, paid with exact change. He went back out to his car, hooked a boot on the fender, glanced up the dark highway. Two more minutes. Another glance into the store told him the kid was absorbed in a comic. He poured the coffee out on the tarmac and slung the piece of pizza into a cholla cactus already festooned with trash. He checked his watch, checked his cell-good signal.
He got in his car, started the engine, and waited.
.
.
.
Bingo: a pair of headlights emerged from the sea of blackness in the north. The headlights slowly grew in size and brightness as the car approached on the
undivided, single-lane highway-and then the truck passed in a flash of turquoise, the red taillights receding into the blackness to the south. Nine-thirty and forty seconds.
He waited, his eyes on the watch, counting out one minute exactly, then he pressed the speed-dial button on his cell.
"Yes?" The voice answered immediately.
"Listen carefully. Maintain your speed. Do not slow down or speed up. Roll down the right-hand window."
"What about my wife?"
"You'll get her in a moment. Do as I say."
"I've got the window down."
Maddox watched the second hand on his watch. "When I tell you, take your cell phone, hang up but leave it on. Put it in the Ziploc bag with the notebook and throw them all out the window. Wait until I give you the signal. After you toss it, don't stop, keep driving."
"Listen, you son of a bitch, I'm not doing anything until you tell me where my wife is."
"Do what I say or she's dead."
"Then you'll never see this notebook."
Maddox checked his watch. Already three and a half minutes had passed. With one hand on the wheel, he pressed the accelerator and turned out on the highway, leaving a line of smoking rubber in the parking lot. "She's in the old campground at Madera Creek, you know the place? Forty miles south of here on the Rio Grande. The bitch resisted me, she got herself hurt, she's bleeding, she's with my partner, if you don't do what I say I'm going to call him and he'll kill her and split. Now put the cell in the bag and toss it, now."
"Know this: if she dies you're a dead man. I'll follow you to the ends of the earth and kill you."
"Stop the grandstanding and do what I say!"
"I'm doing it."
Maddox heard a rustling sound and the line went dead. He released his breath in a big rush. He checked his watch, noted the time to the second, looked at his speedometer. The notebook would be at a point about 4.1 miles south of the mart. He shut his cell phone and maintained speed. He had already scouted the highway, timed the distances, and noted the milestones. He knew within a quarter-mile stretch where the notebook must be.
Maddox passed the mile marker and slowed way down, unrolled his windows, and called Broadbent's number. A second later he could hear the faint answering
ring: and there it was, lying by the side of the road, a plastic Ziploc bag. He cruised past, at the same time switching on a mounted lamp on his Range Rover and shining it around, to make sure Broadbent wasn't waiting in ambush. But the prairie stretched out empty on all sides. He had little doubt that Broadbent was heading south at high speed toward the Madera Campground. He would probably stop in Abiquiu to call the cops and an ambulance. Maddox didn't have much time to get the notebook and get the hell out.
He pulled a U-turn, drove back to the bag, hopped out, and scopped it up. As he accelerated back onto the highway he ripped the bag open with his right hand and groped through trash for the notebook.
There it was. He pulled it out, looked at it. It was bound in old leather and there was even a smudge of blood on the back cover. He opened it. Rows of eight-digit numbers, just as Corvus said. This was it. He'd done it.
He wondered how Broadbent would react when he found the Madera Campground empty. Ends of the earth.
He had the notebook. Now it was time to get rid of the woman.
5
ABOUT A HALF mile south of where he had tossed the journal, Tom shut his lights off and veered off the highway, bounced over a ditch, and busted through a barbed-wire fence. He drove into the dark prairie until he felt he was far enough away from the road. He shut off the engine and waited, his heart pounding.
When the man had said Sally was in the Madera Campground, Tom knew he was lying. The campground was overrun with small children at that time of year, and the screened-in cabins were too public, too exposed. The Madera Campground story was designed to draw him south.
A few minutes later he saw the headlights of a car far behind him. He had passed a Range Rover earlier and had seen the same car in the liquor mart, and he had no doubt this was the kidnapper's car now, as he saw it slowing down along the stretch of highway where he had thrown the notebook. A side lamp went on, scouring the prairie. Tom had a sudden fear of being seen, but the lamp searched only the immediate area. The car pulled a U-turn, came back; a man jumped out and picked up the notebook-he was tall and lanky but too far away to be identifiable. A moment later the man had hopped back in and the car headed north in a screech of rubber.
Tom waited until the car was well ahead on the highway, then, keeping his headlights off, he started his car and drove back to the road. He had to drive blind: if he turned his headlights on the man would know he was being followed-the Chevy with its round, old-fashioned headlights was too identifiable.
Once on the highway he sped up as much as he dared without lights, his eyes on the receding glow of the taillights, but the car ahead was moving fast, and he
realized he had no hope of keeping up without turning on his lights. He had to chance it.
At that moment, he was approaching the liquor mart, and he saw that a pickup truck had pulled in for gas. He braked hard, swerved into the station, pulled up on the opposite side of the pumps. The truck, a shabby Dodge Dakota, was sitting next to the pumps with the keys dangling from the ignition while the driver paid inside. He could just see, in the door pocket, the handle of a gun.
Tom jumped out of his truck, climbed into the Dodge, started the engine, and peeled out with a squeal of rubber. He floored it, heading northward into the darkness where the pair of taillights had vanished.
6
THE CALL CAME in at
Even though Melodic had been waiting for it, she jumped when the phone trilled in the silent, empty lab.
"Melodic? How's the research going?"
"Great, Dr. Corvus, just great." She swallowed, realizing she was breathing hard into the mouthpiece.
"Still working?"
"Yes, yes, I am."
"Those results come in?"
"Yes. They're-incredible."
"Tell me everything."
"The specimen is riddled with iridium-exactly the type of iridium enrichment you find at the K-T boundary, only more so. I mean, this specimen is saturated with iridium."
"What type of iridium and how many parts per billion?"
"It's bound up in various isometric hexoctahedral forms in a concentration oi over 430 ppb. That, as you know, is the exact type identified with the Chicxulub asteroid strike."
Melodic waited for a response but it didn't come.
"This fossil," she ventured, "it wouldn't happen to be located at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary . . . would it?"
"It could be."
Another long silence, and Melodic continued.
"In the outer matrix surrounding the specimen, I found a tremendous abundance of microparticles of soot, of the kind you get from forest fires. According
to a recent article in the Journal of'Geophysical Research, more than a third of the earth's forests burned up following the Chicxulub asteroid strike."
"I'm aware of the article," came the quiet voice of Corvus.
"Then you know that the K-T boundary consists of two layers, first the iridium-enriched debris from the strike itself, and then a layer of soot laid down by worldwide forest fires." She stopped, waiting yet again for a reaction, but there was another long silence on the other end of the phone. Corvus didn't seem to get it-or did he?
"It seems to me . . ." She paused, almost afraid to say it. "Or rather, my conclusion is that this dinosaur was actually killed by the asteroid strike-or it died in the ecological collapse that followed."
This dynamite conclusion fell into the void. Corvus remained silent.
"I would guess that this would also account for the fossil's extraordinary state of preservation."
"How so?" came the guarded response.
"While reading that article, it struck me that the asteroid impact, the fires, and the heating of the atmosphere created unique conditions for fossilization. For one thing, there'd be no scavengers to tear apart the body and scatter the bones. The strike actually heated up the whole earth, making the atmosphere as hot as the
Melodie took a deep breath, waited for a reaction-excitement, astonishment, skepticism. Still nothing.
"Anything more?" asked Corvus.
"Well, then they're the Venus particles."
"Venus particles?"
"That's what I call those black particles you noticed, because under a microscope they look sort of like the symbol for Venus-a circle with a cross coming out of it. You know, the feminist symbol."
"The feminist symbol," Corvus repeated.
"I did some tests on them. They're not a microcrystalline formation or an artifact of fossilization. The particle is a sphere of inorganic carbon with a projecting arm; inside are a bunch of trace elements I haven't yet analyzed."
1 see.
"They're all the same size and shape, which would imply a biological origin. They seem to have been present in the dinosaur when it died and just remained
in place, unchanged, for sixty-five million years. They're . . . very strange. I need to do a lot more work to figure out what they are, but I wonder if they aren't some kind of infectious particle."
There was that strange silence on the other end of the telephone. When Corvus finally spoke, his voice was low. He sounded disturbed. "Anything else, Melodie?"
"That's all." As if that wasn't enough. What was wrong with Corvus? Didn't he believe her?
The Curator's voice was so calm it was almost spooky. "Melodie, this is fine work you've done. I commend you. Now listen carefully: here is what I want you to do. I want you to gather up all your CDs, the pieces of specimen, everything in the lab connected with this work, and I want you to lock it all up securely in your specimen cabinet. If there is by chance anything left in the computer, delete it using the utility program that completely wipes files off the hard disk. Then I want you to go home and get some sleep."