Into the Badlands. Caron Todd

caught a glimpse of the man inside. She got an impression of height and strength.

      Sending up clouds of dust that obscured the Stealth’s reflection in her rearview mirror, she accelerated. The old Ford rattled over the narrow access road, turned onto a gravel road and continued through a treeless landscape, past arid fields dotted with rhythmically dipping oil pumps.

      When she was out of sight of the museum, she drove more slowly, unhappy eyes on the lookout for potholes and prairie dogs. She was already having second thoughts about playing hooky. Provoking her new boss might not be a wise strategy.

      After a long ten miles, Susannah turned onto an uneven rock-strewn track leading into a gully. She stopped beside the science camp’s school bus and sat for a moment, fascinated as always by the extraterrestrial appearance of the deeply rilled hills and time-carved hoodoos.

      He can’t change this.

      She grabbed her backpack and slid from the truck to the rocky ground. A fifteen-minute walk would take her the rest of the way to the quarry.

      ALEXANDER BLAKE TURNED into the museum parking lot just as a battered pickup truck clattered out. He got a quick look at the tense-faced woman at the steering wheel. Dark hair pulled back from a pale, oval face. Slender. Whoever she was, she was in a hurry.

      He parked in a reserved spot, then stood beside his car surveying the place that had lured him away from the field. The museum was long and low and the color of sandstone. It fit right in with the sedimentary hills and dry, rolling prairie. To the east, there was a wide, winding river. Far to the west, the Rocky Mountains’ faded blue foothills merged with the horizon. Not a bad place to spend a couple of months.

      He swung open the staff door and stepped inside. To his left was the preparation lab. Through the small window that let visitors watch technicians free bone from rock, he saw that someone was already at work.

      The galleries, off to the right, were still quiet. They’d be humming with voices soon, when visitors crowded in to see the displays: the primordial invertebrates, the fish that had dragged themselves from the sea onto the land, and the dinosaurs, frozen in flight and ravenous frenzy.

      There was an elevator, but Alex took the stairs two at a time and arrived at the top breathing easily. The nameplate on the first door to his right caught his eye—S. Robb. Hadrosaur nesting habits, he remembered. She’d been short-listed for the job he was about to start.

      An auburn-haired woman was in the room, reading at the desk…the World’s Greatest something or other, according to her mug. Her desk was free of clutter, free, even, of dust. Neat rows of journals, textbooks and color-coded file folders lined a ceiling-to-floor bookcase along one wall. On another, six identically framed photos of quarries formed a perfect rectangle. A collection of rocks stood in orderly rows on shelves under the window, as straight as soldiers on parade. World’s Greatest Organizer?

      The woman noticed him and said warmly, “You must be Dr. Blake.”

      “That’s right. Dr. Robb?”

      She looked surprised. “Oh! I forgot where I was. No. Diane McKay.” She went around the desk to meet him, hand outstretched. “My perfectly usable office is across the hall. I just couldn’t overcome my inertia once I’d sat in Susannah’s chair.”

      “McKay,” he repeated. “Burgess Shale?”

      Diane nodded. “My team has been up there for most of the summer, but I’ve been going back and forth. I want to spend as much of August as I can with my son.”

      “You must have a reliable team.”

      “Don’t tell my boss, but they hardly need me. The same group has been with me for years.”

      Alex could hear morning clatter coming from the other offices. “I’d like to hear more about your quarry, but I don’t want to be late for my own meeting.”

      “You’ll have to come up to Mount Field with me. There’s no place like it anywhere in the world.” The soft-bodied creatures from the Burgess Shale site often seemed like reckless experiments of nature. One, the Opabinia, had five eyes and claws on its nose.

      The suggestion fell in nicely with Alex’s plans. “Are you going back soon?”

      “In a couple of weeks, just for a few days.”

      “Sounds perfect. I’ll be able to take some time away from the museum by then.”

      Diane walked with Alex to the conference room. He sat at the head of the long table and waited for the staff to get settled. He didn’t recognize most of them. Field and lab technicians, probably, or the teachers and artists who helped prepare exhibits. A few paleontologists working at faraway quarries, like those in South America or on Ellesmere Island, near the Arctic Circle, hadn’t made it back to the museum to meet him.

      He could only identify four people at the table. George Connery, a rumpled, dark-haired man fidgeting with his pen and looking as if ten weeks of sleep would do him good. He headed the Bearpaw Formation quarry, studying marine reptiles. Diane McKay, still grasping the mug he now saw praised her parenting skills. Lynn Seton, a dignified older woman…where had he met her? A conference at UBC, he thought. She’d lectured on fossil pollens. She leaned away from a young man sitting beside her…Jeff Somebody, studying links between dinosaurs and modern birds. Had a few too many last night, from the look of it. Alex wondered if it was habitual. Guilty conscience? Stress? Maybe just a special occasion, somebody’s birthday. Across the table was a man of medium height and early middle-age, white coated and frowning, with faint chemical smells clinging to him—probably Charlie Morgan, the head conservator. Susannah Robb seemed to be absent. That was odd. Her quarry was just half an hour away.

      Alex sat forward, a small movement that signaled the meeting was about to start. Shuffling and talking stopped. Twenty faces looked back at him. A lot of people to get to know before he could prove that at least one of them was a thief.

      AT FIRST NO ONE NOTICED Susannah had arrived. She stood on the periphery of the site, watching James work with the new group of children from the science camp, the last group of the summer. Some of the campers used chisels and toothbrushes to chip and brush soft rock away from the specimens. Others painted exposed fossils with preservative, or wrapped them in plaster, to protect them during their trip to the museum.

      “Dr. Robb!”

      Susannah was already familiar with that excited voice. Matt was the busiest, most talkative ten-year-old she’d ever met. He ran toward her, clutching something to his chest. Sand sprayed against her leg when he skidded to a halt at her side.

      “Look what I found!” He was so bursting with eagerness he seemed to take up several feet of space in every direction. He handed her a saucer-size fossil. “It’s a backbone, right?”

      Susannah used her cuff to rub dirt from the specimen. “It’s part of a backbone,” she agreed. “How did you know?”

      Crowding next to her, he traced the fossil’s shape with his finger. “It’s like the backbones on my models at home. It’s a circle, and it’s got these two points.”

      “Those are the pedicles. They formed part of the neural arch, where the spinal cord went through. Any idea how old it is?”

      Matt hesitated. “Seventy-five million years?” James and Susannah had explained how old the site was, and had tried to help the kids make sense of that amount of time. He added, “Before pyramids. Even before people.”

      “That’s right. It’s from the Late Cretaceous period. Where did you find it?”

      “Over there.” He pointed vaguely along the dry riverbed.

      “Exactly where over there? We need to know, because we might find more vertebrae in the same place.”

      Matt’s small body expressed the beginnings of agitation. “Um…”

      “Retrace your steps in your mind,” she suggested quietly. “You left the site and