alone make tea.
'Not at all.' Dearborn moved his foot slightly and pressed a small bump in the floor; a moment later the dim presence of a servant materialized out of the back of the house.
'Tea.'
The man withdrew.
'Now where were we? Ah, yes, Stem Weathers's daughter. Roberta's her name.'
'Robbie.'
'Robbie, that's what her father called her. Unfortunately, she and her father were somewhat estranged. Last I heard she was trying to make it as an artist in Texas-Marfa, I believe. Down there by the Big Bend. A small town- she should be easy to find.'
'How did you know Weathers? Did he collect dinosaurs for you?'
A fat finger tapped on the arm of his chair. 'Nobody collects for me, Thomas, although I might pass on suggestions from some of my clients. I have nothing to do with the collecting-beyond requiring documentary proof that the fossil came from private land.' Here, Dearborn paused long enough for an ironic smile to stretch across the lower part of his face. Then he continued.
'Most of the fossil hunters out there are looking for small stuff. I call them the ferns and fishes crowd, like our Mr. Beezon. Crap by the truckload. Once in a. while they stumble over something important and that's when they come to me.
I have clients who are looking for somerhing quite particular: businessmen, foreign museums, collectors. I match buyers and sellers and take a twenty percent commission. I never see or touch the specimens. I am not a field man.'
Tom stifled a smile.
The servant appeared with an enormous silver tray carrying a pot of tea covered in a quilted cozy, plates heaped with scones, cream puffs, small eclairs, and miniature brioches, jars of marmalade, butter, clotted cream, and honey. He placed the tray on a table to the side of Dearborn and vanished as silently as he had come.
'Excellent!' Dearborn pulled the cozy off the pot, filled two china cups, added milk and sugar.
'Your tea.' He handed the cup and saucer to Tom.
Tom took his cup, sipped.
'I insist on my tea being prepared English style, not as the barbaric Americans make it.' He chuckled and drained his cup in a single smooth motion, placed it down empty, and then reached out with a plump hand and plucked a brioche from the tray, opened it steaming, slathered it in clotted cream, and popped it in his mouth. He next took a hot crumpet, placed a soft dollop of butter on top, and waited for it to melt before eating it.
'Please, help yourself,' he said in a muffled voice.
Tom took an eclair and bit into it. Thick whipped cream squirted out the back and dribbled down his hand. He ate it, licking up the cream and wiping off his hand.
Dearborn smacked his lips, dabbed them with a napkin, and went on. 'Stem Weathers wasn't a ferns and fishes man. He was after unique specimens. He spent his whole life looking for that one big strike. Big-time dinosaur hunters are all of a type. They're not in it for money. They're obsessed. It's the excitement of the hunt, the thrill of the strike, an obsession with finding something of enormous rarity and value-that's what keeps them going.'
He poured a second cup of tea, raised the cup and saucer to his lips, drained it halfway in a single loud sip.
'I handled Stem's finds but otherwise left him alone. He rarely told me what he was doing or where he was looking. This time, however, word got out that he was on to something big in that high mesa country. He talked to too damn many people looking for information-geophysicists, cosmochemists, curators of paleontology at various museums. It was very unwise of him. He was too well known. The rumors were flying thick and fast. Everyone knew how he operated-his homemade GPR and that notebook were both legendary-so it doesn't surprise
rne someone went in there after him. On top of that, the high mesas is all federal jancj-overseen by the Bureau of Land Management. He wasn't supposed to be in there. Anything taken off BLM land without a proper federal permit is grand tneft-pure and simple. And they only issue permits to a select few museums and universities anyway.'
'Why would he take the risk?'
'It's not much of a risk. He's not the only one doing it. Most BLM land is so remote the chances of getting caught are almost nonexistent.' 'What kind of finds did he bring you?'
Dearborn smiled. 'I never kiss and tell. Suffice to say, he never bothered me with mediocre stuff. They say he could smell dead dinosaurs even though they'd been buried millions of years.'
He expelled an elegiac sigh, prematurely cut off by a marmaladed scone entering his mouth. He chewed, swallowed, and went on.
'His problem wasn't finding the dinosaurs; it was what to do after he found them. The financial side always tripped him up. I tried to help but he was always getting himself into trouble. He was a difficult man, a loner, prickly, easy to take offense. Sure, he might find a dinosaur he could sell for half a million dollars, but just to get that fossil out of the ground and ship it to a lab cost him a hundred grand. It takes about thirty thousand man-hours to clean and prepare a large dinosaur-and that doesn't include mounting it. Weathers cared too much about his dinosaurs and as a result he was always broke. But he sure could find them.' 'Do you have any idea who murdered him?'
'No. But it isn't hard to guess what might have happened. Some of the lesser folks had taken to following him around. As I said, word got out. He asked too many questions of too many geologists, especially those studying the K-T mass extinction. Everyone knew Stem was on the prowl, sniffing up something big. My guess is he was murdered by a claim jumper.' Tom leaned forward. 'Anyone in particular?'
Dearborn shook his head, picked up an eclair, and swallowed it. 'I know everyone in this business. Black market dinosaur hunters are a rough lot. They get in fistfights at meetings, they rob each other's quarries, they lie, cheat, steal. But murder? I can't see it. I would guess the killer is a newcomer, or perhaps a hired hand who takes his work a little too seriously.' He drained his cup, poured another. 'These rumors you spoke about?'
'For a couple of years Weathers had been trying to trace a layer of sandstone known as the Hell Creek Formation down into New Mexico.'
'Hell Creek?'
'Almost all the T. Rexes in existence have come out of this immense sedimentary formation which crops out in various places across the Rocky Mountains, but which has never been found in New Mexico. The layer was first discovered by a paleontologist named Barnum Brown, in Hell Creek, Montana, about a hundred years ago, when he found the world's first T. Rex. But 'Weathers was in search of more than just Hell Creek rocks. He had an obsession with the K-T boundary itself.'
'The Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary?'
'That's right. You see, the Hell Creek Formation is topped by the K-T boundary layer. That layer, which is only half an inch thick, records the event that killed off the dinosaurs-the asteroid strike. There aren't many places in the world where there's an interrupted sequence of rocks at the K-T boundary. I think that's what brought him to the high mesa country of Abiquiii-looking for the K-T boundary layer.'
'Why was he looking for the K-T boundary specifically?'
'I'm not sure. In general terms, the K-T boundary is about the most interesting layer of rock ever found. It contains the debris from the asteroid impact along with ash from the burning of the earth's forests. There's a spectacularly clear sequence of K-T boundary layer rocks in the RatonBasin in Colorado. They tell quite a story. The asteroid struck where the Yucatln Peninsula of Mexico is now, coming in at an angle that sprayed molten debris across much of North America. They've named the asteroid Chicxulub, a Mayan word meaning 'The Tail of the Devil'-cute, eh?'
He chuckled and used the opportunity to eat another crumpet.
'Chicxulub struck the earth moving at a speed of Mach forty. It was so large that when the bottom of it was contacting the ground the top was higher than Mount Everest. It vaporized a major chunk of the earth's crust on contact, blasting up a plume of material more than a hundred kilometers wide that punched through the earth's atmosphere and went into orbit, some of it rising halfway to the moon before plunging back at speeds of more than twenty-five thousand miles an hour. The falling material superheated much of the atmosphere, igniting gigantic wildfires that swept the continents, releasing a hundred billion tons of carbon dioxide, a hundred billion tons of
