Dry Bones: A Walt Longmire Mystery Read Online Free

the prairie, I glanced up through the skylight. “What does something like this set you back?”
    He shrugged. “Couple hundred thousand, I don’t know—the accountant said I needed to spend some money fast, so I did.”
    When we made the top of the ridge, Omar wheeled the glossy black fortress to the left and stopped; we rolled down the windows to listen but didn’t hear anything. Vic leaned forward in the passenger seat and pointed down the valley. “There are some vehicles parked at the fence down there through a few cattle guards—you want to go check it out?”
    Spinning the wheel, Omar drove down the slope to a better-maintained road and started off toward the area Vic had indicated.
    She turned to look at me. “So, you know the deceased?”
    Thinking it best to keep the visions to myself, I told her about the Moose Lodge encounter. “I had a couple of beers with him one time a few years ago.” I could feel her looking at the side of my face as I looked out the tinted windows. “There was a disturbance at the bar and when I got there it had settled down, so I had a beer with him. He was worried about some things, so we talked. It took a while for me to remember him.”
    She nodded, not buying a word of it. “What was he worried about?”
    “Nothing, getting old, the land, family, the usual stuff.”
    “He should’ve worried about learning to swim.”
    I recognized Dave Baumann’s weathered, light-blue Land Rover, emblazoned with the logo of the High Plains Dinosaur Museum, driving at high speed toward us. He slid to a stop alongside Omar’s rolling fortress. A quarter of a mile away, I could see another gate where two flatbeds were parked nose to nose blocking the entrance, with some people milling about; beyond that was a working backhoe.
    I rolled down the window and was about to speak when the paleontologist began yelling to the young blonde-haired woman in the passenger seat. “They’re using a backhoe!”
    I stared at Dave, an athletic-looking fellow with glasses, curly light-brown hair and beard, blue eyes, and an easy smile that made him popular with the young female scientists who sometimes came to intern at the private museum—they called him Dino-Dave.
    “Excuse me?”
    He took a deep breath to calm himself and continued. “They’re digging up one of the most valuable sites in recent history with a backhoe.”
    “I’m no expert.” I sighed and glanced at both Vic and Omar. “But that’s probably not good.”
    “No.”
    “Who’s in charge here?”
    “I am.” He studied me and revised his statement. “What do you mean?”
    I had been involved in these kinds of conflicts where the university, the colleges, the museums, and the landowners quibbled about the exact location of digs, and I liked to get the full story before mobilizing the troops. “Is this official or something more loosely structured?”
    “It’s a straight-ahead deal; I paid thirty-seven thousand dollars last year for the fossil remains.”
    I opened the door. “I guess we’d better go over and take a look. Why don’t the two of you jump in here with us, Dave?” They did as I requested, and I thrust a hand toward the blonde. “Walt Longmire.”
    She didn’t take my hand or return my smile. “Jennifer Watt.” She raised her small video camera and began filming through Omar’s windshield.
    I shrugged and sat opposite the two of them—the behemoth vehicle had limousine-style rear seating—feeling like I was in some sort of executive conference room. “Tell me about the deal.”
    Dave leaned forward as Omar drove south. “It was the standard arrangement with the landowner and the HPDM—that we would search for fossils, and anything we found, we would share the profits.”
    Vic turned and looked at him. “I thought the museum was a nonprofit?”
    He nodded. “It is at the end of the fiscal year, but when we first unearthed the jawbone last August and we needed more time, I thought we’d better cement