“Oh, abackhoe,” he says, exhaling. “You mean a back actor—the machine with the shovel.”
Ripley takes in his Lego-block posture, the tight voice, that downturned mouth. Is hejealous?
“Did you thinkbackhoewas code for something?”
His cheeks are as red as they were when she bent over in the stupid skirt. “It does sound quite suggestive.”
“More suggestive thanback actor?” She’s about to make a whole argument of it, but suddenly, she’s too tired. She got up with the damn sun and drove for half the day. They have maybe an hour left to find a needle in a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-fossil haystack, and she hasn’t eaten since noon.
“You don’t get to do this, James. I respect your rules, but you’re not allowed to make me confess that I have feelings for you, then push me away, then act jealous when I’m happy to see an old friend. Who, in case you didn’t notice him flirting with that group from Out-n-About Tours while he was stealing our visitor passes, is gay.”
She expects him to apologize and back off. She does not expect him to say, in a low rasp, “You never said you had feelings for me.” He looks shaken. Starving. His eyes are dark and fathomless.
She lets out a disbelieving breath. “Yes, I did. You saidTell me you want me to stop, and I will.And I didn’t say stop.”
“Ripley,” he says carefully, “that was about—about kissing. I was asking whether I could kiss you.” There’s an artificial smoothness to his voice that hides whatever emotion he’s feeling.
Fuck.She looks down at the smooth concrete floor. She’s surrounded by things that came out of holes in the ground, yet the earth refuses to open up so she can throw herself in.
She grabs a page from the top of the stack. “Forget it. I was confused.” She finds the locker she wants and yanks it open.
He comes to stand on the other side of the metal door. “When I told you I’d stop, Ripley—”
“Stop,” she says abruptly. James immediately steps back. “No, no, not like that. I meant look at this.”
He comes around the door. “What is it?”
“Nothing.” She touches the empty foam liner in the center of the drawer.
“Something’s missing,” he says.
She rechecks the data sheet. The image feels like a punch to her gut.
“It’s a coracoid,” she says. The size, the shape, the birdlike sturdiness—the missing bone could literally have come from Beauty’s other shoulder.
“Possible dromaeosaurid, Dinosaur Provincial Park, 1978,” she reads. Her heart gives a panicky thump. Dromaeosaurids were closely related to birds, but this specimen was found before the paleontology community fully accepted the idea that birds evolved from dinosaurs. It could easily have been misidentified, then overlooked by everyone for the past five decades.
Everyone but Will, that is.
“It’s not marked as loaned or lost,” she says.
“Because it’s not loaned or lost. It’s stolen.” James’s voice is grim, almost a growl. He pulls the drawer out all the way, checksthe boxes at the back. Fourteen more slots are empty—all bigger bones, including a skull.
“Khankhuuluu,” Ripley says, her heart like a stone in her chest.
“Khankhuuluu,” James agrees, his mouth tight.
Stumbling on a mislabeled treasure in a research collection sounds like fantasy, but it happens. A team of Canadians did it with two skeletons in Mongolia that had been misidentified as tyrannosaurs and relegated to storage for fifty years. The story of the newly renamedKhankhuuluu mongoliensisgot picked up by every major media outlet in the Western world.
“Will couldn’t steal the whole thing. Someone might recognize it,” she says, thinking aloud. “But if he included a few pieces as part of a supposedly complete skeleton, would any museum think to check its collection?”
James paces in a tight circle. “If he’s assembled a skeleton from several research collections, he certainly wouldn’t want to subject it to confirmatory testing.”
Ripley’s never been the type to break stuff in frustration, but if she weren’t surrounded by priceless fossils, she might give it a try. “We can’t prove anything with a shitty Polaroid and an empty drawer.”
“I know. For now, we should try to get through as many of the drawers as we can. See how many other fossils he might have taken.” James slides up the cuff of his robin’s-egg-blue button-down and consults his watch. “We still have…”
He frowns at the watch. Taps it. Looks at Ripley, his face slack with panic.
