“To kill Pick.”
“Why would you want to do that? I slept with him. What’s it to you? You slept with that Russian girl, didn’t you? And what’s that to me?”
I turned around. “What’s it to me? What’s it to you? I don’t know, Jeanette, except for this. I love you. I have always loved you. I loved you from the moment Bill first introduced me to you. Sometimes, when I’m around you, I think my heart is going to tear itself right out of my chest. When a day goes by and I don’t see you, I think my soul dies a little. If there wasn’t you, there wouldn’t be me. Not the same me. Some other me. Some sad, unhappy, poor in spirit, poor in life me.”
She glared at me, but then her eyes softened “I never knew,” she said.
I reentered the surgery and went down on one knee beside her, grabbed her, and kissed her full on the mouth. “Now, that’s love, honey,” I said. “Ask your dino hunter to kiss you when you’re covered with shit.”
27
When I got to camp, I saw Pick was back on his sandstone perch over the dig, looking for all the world as if nothing had happened. I considered the best way to kill him and determined there was no best way, only the most fun way. That was going to my tent, getting the .30-06 rifle with the scope, propping it on a boulder, and picking him off like a prairie dog sitting on the lip of his burrow. Like the prairie dog, Pick would fall into his hole or, in this case, on top of his damn dinosaurs. Oh, there would be some consternation and some wailing from Laura and Tanya and maybe even the others but, what the hell, I would have saved us all from Pick’s stupid concept of deep time. Then, maybe we could just dig up the damn bones, sell them legitimately or on the black market, make some money, and go home. Of course, I might not have a home. Likely, I no longer had to quit because I was fired. Then I thought, since I was going to murder Pick, home might not be a problem for me. State Prison in Deer Lodge. That’s where Montana keeps its death row.
Thinking of Deer Lodge and the executioner gave me some pause. There weren’t yet enough Californians in Montana to keep the good and gracious citizens of the Big Sky state from occasionally extracting a life for a life. So while I was pausing, I took stock. I looked up where Pick was sitting and realized he might have had sex with Jeanette but to him it probably didn’t mean that much The only thing that meant anything to him was back in the Cretaceous.
So, instead of killing Pick, I did the next best thing and got myself a beer and sat on one of the lawn chairs around the fire pit and silently talked to myself. It’s sad when you need to talk to someone you can trust and the only person who falls into that category is yourself. But that was my situation and I needed to think through all that had happened and all that I had uncovered to see if there was anything I had missed. It also kept my mind off Jeanette and our dinosaur boy wonder.
I started with Toby. According to the evidence of the note in his pocket, Toby had killed our bull and the cows. This was for reasons unknown but OK, I could believe he was the cow killer. So, ergo, if Toby was the cow killer, then Cade Morgan knew it and maybe had helped. Why? I didn’t know but they were both idiots so maybe Toby did it because he needed to kill something every so often and, when Cade thought it might be him, Mr. Morgan suggested, “Hey, Toby, why don’t you kill that bull and those cows?” Yes, I know that didn’t make sense but, as I said, I was trying to come up with the motivation of idiots.
If I accepted Toby as our cow killer, then what? Somehow, probably, maybe, perhaps, the Haxbys found out about it. How was that? Well, Toby got drunk and talked, or maybe the note in his pocket fell out and somebody saw it, or maybe Cade let it slip. There were a lot of ways Toby’s guilt could have been exposed and, in Fillmore County, you didn’t murder cows without someone getting even. So why the bashed head and slit throat? Well, the Haxbys were decidedly an eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth bunch so it would be just like them. Of course, there was nothing in the history of the Haxbys to suggest they were cold-blooded killers but that was true of most cold-blooded killers. Yes, all right, OK, I decided the Haxbys had done ol’ Toby in, probably in that little copse of trees behind the marina, then dragged him down to the lake and tossed him in. That made me wish I’d searched that little copse of trees but never mind. I reminded myself for the umpteenth time I was no longer a detective and I had no business investigating this or any other crime. So why was I going through all this in my mind? Well, why not? It beat dragging my tired butt up that hill and, like I said, thinking about Jeanette and Pick. I needed another beer.