The Investigator Asked Me To Read A Number Backward

Mateo waited outside while I called the public field office number.

He did not wave at his badge or point to the cold. When the duty officer confirmed his name, I opened the door and called Ruth back.

"I can be there in fifteen minutes," she said. "Keep the collections locked."

Mateo took the chair closest to the exit.

"Do you want someone else here while we talk?" he asked.

"She's coming."

"Then we can wait."

I had expected questions fired across a table. Instead, he studied the brush rack without touching it.

"You repair those?"

"The handles. New brushes cost money."

"My father sharpened pencils until he couldn't hold them."

I almost smiled.

He told me he was thirty-nine and Mexican American while explaining how often strangers decided he should speak for every Spanish-speaking witness. He said it without asking me to share anything in return.

Ruth arrived carrying her coat rather than wearing it. She had left her house in such a hurry that her slippers were still on.

Mateo showed us his shipping form.

"A cast exhibit went from Vernal to a private event in Nevada," he said. "The receiving clerk reported one crate was much heavier than its declared contents. It was gone before anyone could inspect it."

"That's Rafe's seal series," Ruth said.

"We obtained the freight record. Your museum appears as the preparation site."

I unlocked the cabinet.

"Before we move this," I said, "I need the time and both your names."

Mateo took out a pen.

"Good."

We laid the negative on a clean padded tray. It looked like a blue rubber shell, dull on the outside, full of sharp detail within.

"Don't turn it inside out," I told him. "The thin edges can tear."

He drew his hands back.

I set a mirror beside the witness tab. The reversed letters became plain.

BH-73184.

Mateo bent close.

"The ridge?"

"A fracture. See how it forks here? There's a little pit below the lower arm. Those aren't sculpted decoration."

"Can you say it's a real fossil?"

"From this alone? No. A good cast can repeat every mark. I can say what passed through my hands had this surface, beside this seal."

He wrote down my exact answer.

Then he read it back. He changed one word when I corrected him and initialed the change. I had spent years watching people round off details that mattered to the work.

That was the first thing I trusted about him.

He showed us a field photograph from a reported illegal dig on federal land north of town. Someone had taken most of a small meat-eating dinosaur skeleton. Investigators had found cut jacket scraps and an empty pit.

One scrap bore the edge of a tail bone.

"We need more than a picture that looks close," he said. "We need the land records, expert comparisons, and people who can place the bones."

"And the shipping forms," I said.

"Those too."

With Ruth's written consent, he photographed the negative in place, then sealed it for transfer to a federal lab. We signed each page of the custody record. Ruth kept the receipt and a complete image set in museum storage.

I made eight brushstrokes while the camera battery charged.

"Does that help?" Mateo asked.

"Sometimes."

He didn't ask me to stop.

The next morning, Rafe found the cabinet empty and an evidence receipt clipped inside its door.

"You gave away my property."

"Museum property," Ruth said from behind him.

He turned toward her.

"I'll send an invoice for the whole exhibit. $210,000."

"Send it to counsel."

His gaze moved back to me.

"You don't understand the people you've upset."

I wrote those words in my incident log after he left. Not what I thought he meant. What he said. Time, place, who heard it.

Two days later, Mateo called. A warrant had allowed his team to inspect a Belloc storage unit near Naples. Freight records and the receiving clerk's statement had helped establish the grounds. The mold photographs were another piece.

Inside a crate marked RESIN RIBS, they had found a real rib.

An examiner had confirmed bone under the coating.

"Is it from the same animal?" I asked.

"We don't know yet."

"Who packed it?"

"We're looking for the driver. June Haskell."

That evening, the wind carried the smell of coal smoke down my street. I was scraping burnt rice from a pot when someone knocked three times.

June stood on my porch with a paper grocery sack held against her chest.

I knew her from the loading dock. She usually laughed before she spoke.

She wasn't laughing now.

"They found the rib," she said. "And my boss just sent me a copy of my daughter's school picture."