Tyrannosaurus Wrecks Page 2

  This was true. Several crimes had occurred around FunJungle over the past year, and I had gotten involved in figuring out who was behind them, often against my will. But I had also ended up in a great deal of danger, which is why I wasn’t in a big hurry to get involved in another case.

  In the otter pit, I heard the distinct sound of Marge O’Malley tumbling off the ladder and landing painfully on the ground. This was followed by a long stream of bad words from Marge. Some tourists quickly led their children away, but many more came running over, excited to see what had sparked so many expletives.

  Lauren Bohn looked into the exhibit, concerned. “Oh boy,” she said to Chet. “Please tell me she didn’t land on one of my otters.”

  Sage turned to me expectantly, his dour mood having faded a bit. “Do you think you could help with this case?”

  “I don’t know…,” I said cautiously.

  “You’ve found stolen animals before,” Sage pressed. “Like that panda. And the koala. So maybe you could help find Minerva, too! Your dad has to take me back to the ranch anyhow, right? Why not take a look around and see if you can find any clues?”

  “Aren’t the police investigating this?” I asked.

  “I guess,” Sage said, though he didn’t seem pleased about it.

  “You’re way better than the police,” Xavier told me supportively. “Remember when Henry the Hippo got killed? The police didn’t even try to investigate that case! They laughed at you when you called it in.”

  “They thought it was a prank,” I pointed out. “Not that many people murder hippos. In America, at least.”

  “But someone did murder Henry,” Xavier said. “And if it hadn’t been for you, no one would have ever figured that out….” He trailed off as he noticed two tourists hurrying toward the otter pit.

  It was a young couple, and both of them were wearing T-shirts for Snakes Alive, which was a small zoo that had recently been built on the interstate near the exit for FunJungle. Xavier hated the place even more than he hated people who banged on the glass of animal exhibits. While most of the animals at Snakes Alive were reptiles, they also had a few mammals, like a troop of colobus monkeys, a lion, and a small pack of hyenas. The owners made no secret of the fact that they were trying to siphon off business from our park. Their billboards all proclaimed: More Fun than FunJungle—and a Whole Lot Cheaper!

  But that wasn’t Xavier’s issue with Snakes Alive. He was upset about their animal care, which was rumored to be dismal. Neither of us had visited the place yet—we didn’t want to support it—but several other kids from school had gone. My friend Dashiell had described it as “the place where fun goes to die.” Despite this, Snakes Alive still seemed to be attracting enough tourists to survive.

  “You shouldn’t support Snakes Alive,” Xavier informed the tourists. “It’s not accredited by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.”

  “So?” the guy asked. “It was still cool.”

  “Zoos in the AZA are required to maintain high levels of animal care,” Xavier explained. “Snakes Alive doesn’t.”

  “The animals looked fine to me,” the tourist woman said. “They had a giant cobra—and a place where you could feed hot dogs to baby alligators.”

  “That was so cool!” the guy exclaimed. “Is there any place you can feed alligators here?”

  “No!” Xavier gasped, horrified by the thought. “And alligators shouldn’t be eating hot dogs anyhow. Hot dogs aren’t found in nature.”

  “Neither are Doritos,” the woman said, “but we’ve got a raccoon in the park by our house who eats them all the time.”

  “That doesn’t mean they’re healthy for it,” Xavier said, exasperated. “Snakes Alive isn’t a good place for animals!”

  “Maybe not,” the guy said, getting annoyed now, “but you know what they don’t have there? Little dorks who give you crap for visiting the place.”

  “Besides,” the woman added, “it’s not like FunJungle is much better. You’ve got people climbing in with the otters.”

  We turned back to the otter habitat. There were now half a dozen FunJungle security guards heading down into the otter pit to deal with Marge and apprehend the Zebra Spanker. We could still hear Marge cursing, while the Zebra Spanker was angrily claiming that he had been assaulted by otters and demanding to see a lawyer.

  The tourists in the T-shirts continued on, figuring they had made their point. Xavier could only sigh in exasperation.

  Sage returned his attention to me. “Will you at least come see the dinosaur dig?” he asked.

  I had to admit that sounded cool. I had never been to a fossil site before. Even a desecrated one would have been interesting. “I’m not promising to get involved in solving this crime,” I said. “The police should handle it. Not me.”

  “Of course,” Sage agreed. “And you can invite Summer, too, if you want.”

  Summer was my girlfriend, who also happened to be the daughter of J.J. McCracken, the owner of FunJungle. I wondered if Sage was inviting her along because he thought she was cool—or because she had helped me solve crimes before.

  I still found myself hesitating, though, wary of getting dragged into something dangerous again. “I’m not sure…”

  Sage said, “We all get to ride ATVs to get out to the site.”

  “Deal,” I said. A ride across Sage’s ranch on all-terrain vehicles and a dinosaur fossil site was too much fun to turn down. And I figured that I could control my own destiny. If I didn’t want to get mixed up in the mystery, I didn’t have to. Taking a look at the crime scene didn’t mean I would end up in trouble again.

  As usual, things didn’t work out the way I had planned. In a few days’ time, I’d be in a bigger mess than I ever had been before.

  3 THE DIG

  Sage hadn’t offered the ride on the ATVs merely to entice me to visit the crime scene. It turned out that we really couldn’t get to the dig site without them.

  The Bonotto Ranch was massive, more than twelve thousand acres, which made it larger than a lot of entire counties in America. It had been in Sage’s family for over a hundred and fifty years. Most of the other big ranches in the area from that time had been carved up and sold off piece by piece to build subdivisions and golf courses. What remained weren’t necessarily working ranches so much as big spreads of land where rich people could graze a few cattle and pretend to be ranchers—like the McCrackens. But the Bonottos still made their living raising cattle, just as their ancestors had. The ranch had barely changed in the time that their family had owned it. It was mostly oak and cedar forest, interspersed with the occasional field of grass.

  The driveway was nearly six miles long, and since it was unpaved, you couldn’t go faster than fifteen miles an hour on it. Thus, it took at least twenty-four minutes to get from the front gate to the house—and that could be even longer if a herd of cattle was blocking the driveway, which happened quite often. Sage’s parents couldn’t take an hour every time they needed to drop him off at the gate for the school bus, or to collect him after a play date, so when Sage was in second grade, they had given him a car. The law in Texas said you could drive if you were on your own land, no matter how old you were. Sage’s car was an old, beat-up Chevrolet, but it never went anywhere except to the front gate and back. Sometimes Sage even let me drive the car to his house.

  The old Chevy was sitting at the gate when Dad brought Sage, Xavier, and me to the ranch. Sage had left it there when he had come to my house the day before. Summer was waiting nearby in her own car with her driver, a young guy named Tran. When I had texted Summer about possibly coming to visit a tyrannosaur fossil site—and a crime scene—she had been so excited that she had immediately canceled her horseback riding lessons and her jujitsu classes to clear out her day.

  Even though Summer was incredibly rich, she didn’t act like it. And she considered the fame that came as a result of her wealth to be a burden, rather than a blessing. (Summer always did her best to behave like a no
rmal girl, but she was rich and pretty, so gossip sites and magazines were constantly doing stories about her, which were almost always wrong; they were often about her love life, romantically linking her to famous people she had never even met.) So Summer tried to call as little attention to herself as possible. Instead of having Tran drive her around in a limousine, she rode in a normal car that was several years old. She never held my hand in public, because she didn’t want the press to realize I was her boyfriend and invade my life too. And while she could glam herself up for public events, she preferred to hide behind sunglasses and a baseball cap so people wouldn’t recognize her. She was wearing those today, despite the clouds, as well as old jeans and a sweatshirt that she could get muddy.

  My father also planned to join us that day. Although he had traveled all around the world taking pictures of wildlife for National Geographic, he had never been to a dinosaur dig either, so he had eagerly asked if he could join us, and Sage welcomed him. Dad insisted upon driving Summer, Xavier, and me up the driveway in his car while Sage took the old Chevy. Even though Sage drove that route almost every day, Dad still didn’t feel comfortable letting a sixth grader chauffeur him around.

  Sage’s home was a small ranch house that had been built by his great-great-grandparents. Beside it stood a barn, several cattle pens, and a long corrugated tin roof on poles that sheltered the many vehicles the Bonottos owned: In addition to Sage’s car, they had three pickup trucks, two horse trailers, a tractor, a hay baler and eight ATVs—though three were gone when we arrived.

  Two county police cars sat by the house. One was marked Sheriff.

  Dad and Sage parked their cars. Dad had brought along one of his best professional cameras and a variety of lenses, which he carried in a specially designed backpack, where they were nestled in foam. He slung this onto his back while Sage led us to the ATVs.

  There were other dirt roads on the ranch besides the driveway, but they were poorly maintained and thus required four-wheel drive. (Sage claimed there were some distant parts of the property that no one had visited in years.) Sage’s parents and their ranch hands usually got around in trucks—or on horses—but there were ATVs for everyone else.

  Sage handed out helmets and protective gear to us, and we suited up, hopped on ATVs, and headed for the fossil site. Since the ATV engines were too loud to shout over, there were radios built into the helmets so we could stay in touch on the way. I had ridden the ATVs on Sage’s ranch before, but never on a muddy day. Riding through the mud turned out to be great fun—as long as you didn’t mind getting spattered with it. Summer and Dad enjoyed it as much as I did, whooping with delight as we roared across the fields and slewed through the muck, but Xavier was more reserved. He drove much slower than the rest of us, taking every curve as cautiously as a deer in tiger territory. We had to stop repeatedly to wait for him to catch up to us.

  Eventually, we made it to the dig.

  It was located on a bend in a tributary of the Guadalupe River that wound across the ranch. I had been along this stretch before; normally, the river was about twenty feet across and only two feet deep, but given the previous night’s storm, it had overflowed its banks and seemed to be at least a foot higher. The water was moving fast and so clouded with runoff that it looked like chocolate milk. The river snaked through a wide, grassy plain; its dusty banks framed by dirt bluffs that were about five feet high. The dig was on the riverside, out in the open, with no trees to shade it, where the river cut close to the bluff.

  Five canopies had been erected around the site. They were the kind you got at the sporting goods store for parents to sit under at their kids’ soccer games, although some of our neighbors in employee housing had put them up beside their trailers to give themselves some shade outdoors. Here, they stood over bare patches of dirt where all the grass had been scraped away.

  A lot of people were standing outside the canopies; the sky was cloudy enough that no one was looking for shade. Everyone was watching us approach. They had probably heard our ATVs several minutes before we arrived.

  I counted both Sage’s parents, two uniformed police officers, and eight other people who I figured were paleontologists.

  The mood around the dig was sullen and glum. The joy we had felt riding the ATVs instantly vanished.

  We had to park on the high ground, atop the small bluffs. The other three ATVs the Bonottos owned were already there—along with Sage’s mother’s horse, Cleopatra. I figured the police and Sage’s father had come out on the ATVs, which meant all the other people must have walked to the site, even though it was several miles to the nearest road. Cleopatra wasn’t even tied up. She was roaming freely, happily grazing on grass and in no mood to wander off.

  Sage led the way down a muddy path in one of the bluffs.

  His parents came to meet us as we approached, looking as though our presence there was making them uncomfortable. Sage’s father was a tall, burly man with skin so weathered by the sun that he looked much older than he really was. I had never seen him without a cowboy hat. Sage’s mother was slim and fit; she was renowned as the best horseback rider in the county and had won plenty of equestrian awards when she was younger.

  “Sage,” his mother said, “we told you to come alone. This is supposed to be a secret.”

  “What’s it matter now?” Sage asked. “Someone already stole Minerva….”

  “Not all of her,” his father said tightly.

  “I figured these guys could help us,” Sage protested. “Teddy and Summer solved all those crimes at FunJungle. Maybe they could solve this, too.”

  Sage’s parents both looked at Summer and me thoughtfully.

  I wasn’t quite sure what to do. So I just waved to them awkwardly.

  Dad stepped up. “Joe and Lorena, we’re sorry for intruding. We didn’t realize this was a secret. We’d be happy to leave you to this….”

  Mrs. Bonotto asked Summer and me, “You found that stolen panda, right? When even the FBI couldn’t?”

  “That’s right!” Summer said cheerfully.

  Sage’s father looked at her curiously. “You’re J.J. McCracken’s daughter?”

  “Right again,” Summer agreed.

  Joe and Lorena shared a look. Somehow, without saying anything, they seemed to come to an agreement.

  “All right,” Joe said. “Come on down. But don’t touch anything. This is a crime scene.”

  “We know how to handle a crime scene,” Summer said confidently. “This isn’t our first.”

  I didn’t feel nearly as comfortable as Summer did. It now seemed that we were only being allowed to visit the dig site because we were amateur detectives—which I hadn’t meant to happen. But there didn’t seem to be any polite way to excuse ourselves, and Summer, Xavier, and even my father seemed too excited to leave.

  I was also a little wary of why Mr. Bonotto had asked about Summer’s father. J.J. McCracken was one of the wealthiest men in Texas, if not the country. I wondered if that had anything to do with our invitation to stay as well.

  The Bonottos led us into the dig site. Now it was the police who grew annoyed by our presence.

  I recognized the sheriff as we approached. Lyle Esquivel was a stocky man in his fifties with a thick mustache and bushy eyebrows. There wasn’t much crime in our county—the incidents at FunJungle had been out of his jurisdiction—so Sheriff Esquivel and his force didn’t really have much to do. They mostly busted people for speeding, and the sheriff came to school every year to give us a safety presentation, during which half the class always fell asleep.

  The other officer was a young woman I didn’t know. She was of medium height, with long hair and a name tag that said BREWSTER. She was taking pictures of the crime scene with her phone, though she paused to watch Sheriff Esquivel with us.

  The other people on the dig were watching us too. I wondered if anyone might recognize Summer, but they didn’t seem to. Summer’s baseball cap, sunglasses, and newly mud-splattered clothes gave her a ve
ry different appearance than her clean-cut, fashionable public persona.

  “These kids shouldn’t be here,” Esquivel told the Bonottos. “This ain’t a tourist attraction.”

  “I’d like them to stay,” Sage’s father replied. The sheriff started to argue this, but Mr. Bonotto cut him off. “This is our property and they’re our guests. They’re staying. So let’s get back to the investigation, shall we?”

  Sheriff Esquivel gave him a long, hard stare, as though he was debating whether or not to pick a fight over this. Then the stare shifted to the rest of us. Finally, he turned around and led us toward the dig. “Before we were interrupted,” he said sharply, “I was questioning how this crime could have possibly been carried out. Some of what you’re telling me doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  “We’re being completely honest with you,” Mrs. Bonotto said, sounding slightly offended.

  “I don’t doubt your honesty,” Esquivel told her. “I just think you might have some of the facts messed up. You’re telling me this skull weighed five hundred pounds?”

  “At least,” Sage’s father said. “Probably more. We couldn’t exactly weigh it.”

  “Wait,” Xavier blurted out, unable to control himself. “Only the skull was stolen? Not the whole dinosaur?”

  Esquivel turned and glared at Xavier, making it very clear he didn’t appreciate the interruption.

  “Yes,” one of the women at the dig answered. “But as far as we’re concerned, the skull pretty much was the dinosaur.” She was thin and pretty, dressed in a button-down shirt with muddy jeans and work boots. Zinc oxide sunblock was smeared across her face like war paint, even though it was a cloudy day. Despite the woman’s obvious distress at the crime, she did her best to be welcoming as she came over to greet us. “I’m Ellen Chen from the University of Texas. I’m the lead paleontologist on this project.”

  Dad, Xavier, Summer, and I all said hello.

  “You need to understand,” Ellen went on, “we’ve only found about thirty-five percent of a tyrannosaur skeleton here—”