Tyrannosaur Canyon Read online

  Maddox began sorting through the batch of handwritten letters – illiterate letters laboriously written out on cheap lined paper in blunt pencil, many with grease stains and fingerprints. Clipped to each letter was a snapshot of the ugly bastard who had written it. What a bunch of losers.

  He pulled the first letter out, smoothed it down on his tray table next to the computer, and began to read.

  Dere Mr. Madocks,

  Im Londell Franklin James A 34 year old White Aryan Man from Arundell, Ark. my dick is 9 inchs rock hard all the way and Im looken for a blond lady no fat ass back talking bitches please just a lady who likes 9 inchs right up to the hilt plus im 6foot two pure pumped up rock hard mussle with a tatoo of a deaths head on my right deltoid and a dragon on my chest Im looken for a slim lady from the Deep South no niggers quadroons or New York femminatzi bitches just an old fashoned White Aryan Southern Girl who knows how to please a man and cook chicken and grits Im doing five to fifteen armed robbery the DA lied about the plea bargin but I got a parole hearing in two yeares 8 months I want a hot lady waiten for me on the outside reddy to take it right up to the hilt.

  Maddox grinned. Now there was a mother who was going to spend the rest of his life in prison – parole or no parole. Some people were just naturally born to it. He started typing into his laptop:

  My name is Lonnie F. James and I'm a thirty-four-year-old Caucasian male from Arundell, Arkansas, doing five to fifteen years for armed robbery, with parole expected in less than three years. I am in superb physical condition, six feet two inches tall, 190 pounds, a serious weight lifter and body builder. Ladies, I am very well endowed. My sign is Capricorn. I have a tattoo of a death's head on my right arm and a tattoo of St. George killing the Dragon on my chest. I'm looking for a petite, blond, blue-eyed, old-fashioned Southern Belle for correspondence, romance, and commitment. You should be trim and shapely, twenty-nine or younger, sweet as mint julep – but at the same time a woman who knows a real man when she sees one. I like country music, good country cooking, pro football, and holding hands on long walks down country roads in the misty morning.

  Now that was inspired, thought Maddox, reading it over. Sweet as mint julep. He read through it again, deleted the "misty morning" bit, saved it on his computer. Then he looked at the photograph that came with the letter. Another ugly mother – this one with a bullet head and eyes set so close together they looked like they'd been squeezed in a vise. He would scan it and post it all the same. In his experience looks didn't count. What counted was that Londell Franklin James was in there and not out here. As such, he offered the right woman a perfect relationship. A woman could write him, exchange sex-letters, make promises, swear undying love, talk about babies and marriage and the future – and none of it would change the fact that he was in there, and she was out here. She had ultimate control. That's what it was all about – control – plus the erotic bang it gave some women to correspond with a chiseled-up guy doing serious time for armed robbery who claimed he had a nine-inch dick. Yeah, and who was to prove otherwise?

  He clicked on a fresh screen and moved to the next letter.

  Dear Mr. Maddox,

  I am looking for a woman to mail my jizum to so as she can have my baby–

  Maddox made a face and crumpled that one up, shoving it into the seat pocket in front of him. Christ, he ran a dating service, not a sperm bank. He had started Hard Time while working in the prison library, where there was an old IBM 486 computer being used as a card catalog. His days in the Army as a gunnery sergeant had taught him all he needed to know about computers. In this day and age you could hardly fire a projectile bigger than a .50-caliber round without a computer. Maddox was surprised to find he had a major talent for computers. Unlike people, they were clean, odorless, obedient, and didn't haul around a bullshit attitude. He started off collecting ten bucks from cons for posting their names and addresses at a Website he had created, soliciting female penpals on the outside. It had really taken off. Maddox soon realized the big money was to be made not from the cons, but from the women. It amazed him how many women wanted to date a man in prison. He charged twenty-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents a month to belong to Hard Time, $199 a year, and for that you got unlimited access to the personals – photos and addresses included – of more than four hundred real cons doing serious time for everything from murder and rape to kidnapping, armed robbery, and assault. There were now three women subscribers to every con, almost twelve hundred ladies, and after deducting expenses he was pulling down three bills a week, free and clear.

  A "prepare for landing" announcement came over the intercom and a flight attendant came through, nodding and smiling, murmuring for all the businessmen to shut down their laptops. Maddox stowed his under the seat and looked out the window. The brown landscape of New Mexico was passing by as the jet approached Albuquerque from the east, the land rising to the slopes of the Sandia Mountains, suddenly dark with trees and then white with snow. The plane passed the mountains and they were over the city, banking toward the approach. Maddox had a view of everything, the river, the freeways, the Big I, all the little houses climbing up into the foothills. It depressed him to see so many useless people living such pathetic lives in those ant boxes. It was almost like being in prison.

  No, he took that back. Nothing was almost like being in prison.

  His mind drifted to the problem at hand, feeling a sudden rush of irritation. Broadbent. The man must have been waiting for his moment up there in the Maze. Just waiting. Maddox had done all the work, popped the guy, and then Broadbent stepped in, helped himself to the notebook, and split. The son of a bitch had wrecked a perfect finish.

  Maddox took a deep breath, closed his eyes, said his mantra over a few times in his head, tried to meditate. No sense in getting all worked up. The problem was fairly simple. If Broadbent was keeping the notebook in his house, Maddox would find it. If not, then Maddox would find a way to force it out of him. The man simply had no idea who he was dealing with. And since Broadbent was up to his neck in it, it was unlikely he'd call in the cops. This was going to be settled between them privately.

  He owed it to Corvus; Jesus, he owed him his life.

  He settled back as the 747 came in for a landing, nice and soft, the plane barely kissing the ground. Maddox took it as a sign.

  Chapter 10

  THE NEXT MORNING Tom found his assistant, Shane McBride, at the hot walker, eyeballing a sorrel quarter horse trudging around the circle. Shane was an Irish guy from South Boston who went to Yale, but he'd picked up western ways with a vengeance and now he looked more cowboy than the locals. He stomped around in roping boots and sported a bushy mustache, with a dented Stetson with a scoop-brim jammed on his head, a faded black bandanna tied around his neck, his lower lip packed with chaw. He knew horses, had a sense of humor, was serious about his work, and was loyal to a fault. As far as Tom was concerned he was the perfect partner.

  Shane turned to Tom, pulled off his hat, wiped his brow, and screwed up one eye. "What do you think?"

  Tom watched the horse move. "How long's he been on there?"

  "Ten minutes."

  "Pedal osteitis."

  Shane unscrewed his eye. "Naw. You're wrong there. Sesamoiditis."

  "The fetlock joints aren't swollen. And the injury is too symmetrical."

  "Incipient, and sesamoiditis can also be symmetrical."

  Tom narrowed his eyes, watched the horse move. "Whose is it?"

  "Noble Nix, belongs to the O Bar O. Never had a problem before."

  "Cow horse or hunter-jumper?"

  "Cutting horse."

  Tom frowned. "Maybe you're right."

  "Maybe? There ain't no maybe about it. He just came back from competing in Amarillo, won a saddle. The workout, combined with the long trailering, would do it."

  Tom stopped the walker, knelt, felt the horse's fetlocks. Hot. He rose. "I still say it's pedal osteitis, but I'll concede that it might be pedal osteitis in the sesamoid bones
."

  "You should've been a lawyer."

  "In either case, the treatment's the same. Complete rest, periodic hosing with cold water, application of DMSO, full leather pads for the feet."

  "Tell me something I don't know."

  Tom grasped Shane by the shoulder. "You're getting pretty good at this, eh, Shane?"

  "You got it, boss."

  "Then you won't mind running the show today, too."

  "Things go a lot better when you're not here – cold cerveza, mariachis, bare-assed women."

  "Don't burn the place down."

  "You still looking for that gal whose daddy was killed in the Maze?"

  "I'm not having much luck. The police can't find the body."

  "It ain't no surprise to me they can't find the body. That's a big damn country back up there."

  Tom nodded. "If I could figure out what he'd written in that journal of his, it would probably tell me who he was."

  "It probably would."

  Tom had told Shane everything. They had that kind of relationship. And Shane, despite his garrulousness, was implicitly discreet.

  "You got it on you?"

  Tom pulled the notebook out of his pocket.

  "Lemme see." He took it, flipped through it. "What's this? Code?"

  "Yes."

  He shut it, examined the cover. "That blood?"

  Tom nodded.

  "Jesus. The poor guy." Shane handed him back the notebook. "If the cops learn you held out on 'em, they'll weld the cell door shut."

  "I'll remember that."

  Tom walked around behind the clinic to check the horses in the stalls; he went down the line, patting each one, murmuring soothing words, checking them out. He finished up at his desk and sorted through the bills, noting that some were overdue. He hadn't paid them, not through lack of money but through sheer laziness; both he and Shane hated the paperwork end of the business. He dumped them back into the in-box without opening any. He really needed to hire a bookkeeper to handle all this paperwork, except that the extra expense would put them back into the red, after a year of hard work getting themselves to the breakeven point. The fact that he had a hundred million dollars in escrow didn't matter. He wasn't his father. He needed to turn a profit for himself.

  He shoved the papers aside and pulled out the notebook, opening it and laying it on the table. The numbers beckoned – in there, he felt sure, was the secret to the man's identity. And of the treasure he found.

  Shane poked his head in.

  "How's that O Bar O gelding?" Tom asked.

  "Doctored and in his stall." Shane hesitated in the door.

  "What is it?"

  "You remember last year, when that monastery up the Chama River had a sick ewe?"

  Tom nodded.

  "When we were up there, remember hearing about a monk up there who used to be a code breaker for the CIA, gave it all up to become a monk?"

  "Yeah. I remember something like that."

  "Why don't you ask him to take a crack at the notebook?"

  Tom stared at Shane. "Now that's the best idea you've had all week."

  Chapter 11

  MELODY CROOKSHANK ADJUSTED the angle on the diamond wafering blade and upped the rpm. It was a beautiful piece of precision machinery – you could hear it in the clear singing noise it made. She set the sample in the cutting bed, tightening it in place, then turned on the laminar water flow. A gurgling noise rose above the whine of the blade as the water bathed the specimen, bringing out flecks of color in it, yellow, red, deep purple. She made some final adjustments, set the automatic guide speed, and let it rip.

  As the specimen encountered the diamond blade there was a note of pure music. In a moment the specimen had been cut in half, the treasure of its interior exposed to view. With the deft experience of years she washed and dried it, flipped it, embedding the other side in epoxy resin on a steel manipulator.

  As she waited for the epoxy to harden she examined her sapphire bracelet. She'd told her friends that it was a cheap bit of costume jewelry and they believed her. Why wouldn't they? Who would have thought, she, Melodie Crookshank, Technical Assistant First Grade, making all of twenty-one thousand dollars a year, living in an airshaft apartment on upper Amsterdam Avenue

  , with no boyfriend and no money, would be walking around wearing ten carats of Sri Lankan blue star sapphires? She knew very well she was being used by Corvus – such a man would never take a serious romantic interest in her. On the other hand it wasn't coincidence that he had entrusted her with this job. She was good – damn good. The bracelet was part of a strictly impersonal transaction: compensation for her expertise and discretion. Nothing dishonorable in that.

  The sample had hardened. She placed it back in the cutting bed and sliced again on the other side. In a moment she had a slender wafer of stone, about half a millimeter thick, perfectly cut with nary a crack or chip. She quickly dissolved the resin, freed the wafer, and cut it into a dozen smaller pieces, each one destined for a different kind of test. Taking one of the chips, she fixed it in epoxy on another manipulator and used the lap wheel and polisher to thin it further, until it was beautifully transparent and about twice the thickness of a human hair. She mounted it on a slide and placed it on the stage of the Meiji polarizing scope, switched it on, and put her eyes to the oculars.

  With a rapid adjustment of the focusing knobs a rainbow of color leapt into her vision, a whole world of crystalline beauty. The sheer splendor of the polarizing scope always took her breath away. Even the dullest rock bared its inner soul. She set the magnification at 30x and began stepping through the polarization angle thirty degrees at a time, each change producing a new shower of color in the specimen. This first run was purely for aesthetics; it was like gazing into a stained-glass window more beautiful than the Rosette in Chartres Cathedral.

  As she moved through 360 degrees of polarization, Crookshank felt her heart accelerating with every new angle. This was truly an incredible specimen. After a complete series she upped the magnification to 120x. The structure was so fine, so perfect – astonishing. She could now understand the secrecy. If there were more of this in situ – and there probably was – it would be of the utmost importance to keep it secret. This would be a stunning coup, even for a man as distinguished as Corvus.

  She leaned back from the eyepieces, a new thought entering her head. This might be just the thing she needed to leverage a tenure-track position for herself, if she played her cards right.

  Chapter 12

  CHRIST IN THE Desert Monastery lay fifteen miles up the Chama River, deep in the Chama wilderness and hard alongside the enormous cliff-walled bulk of Mesa de los Viejos, the Mesa of the Ancients, which marked the beginning of the high mesa country. Tom drove up the monastery road with excruciating slowness, hating to subject his precious Chevy to one of the most notorious roads in New Mexico. The road had so many potholes it looked bombed, and there were sections of washboard that threatened to shake loose every bolt in the vehicle and chip his teeth down to stubs. The monks, it was said, liked it that way.

  After what seemed like a journey to the very ends of the earth, Tom spied the adobe church tower rising above the junipers and chamisa. Gradually the rest of the Benedictine monastery came into view – a cluster of brown adobe buildings scattered helter-skelter on a bench of land above the floodplain of the river, just below where Rio Gallina joined the Rio Chama. It was said to be one of the most remote Christian monasteries in the world.

  Tom parked his truck in the dirt lot and walked up the trail to the monastery's shop. He felt awkward, wondering just how he would go about asking for the monk's help. He could hear the faint sound of singing drifting down from the church, mingling with the raucous cries of a flock of piñon jays.

  The shop was empty, but the door had tinkled a bell when Tom had opened it, and a young monk came in from the back.

  "Hello," said Tom.

  "Welcome." The monk took a seat on a high wooden stool behind the
shop's counter. Tom stood there indecisively, looking at the humble products of the monastery: honey, dried flowers, handprinted cards, wood carvings. "I'm Tom Broadbent," he said, offering his hand.

  The monk took it. He was small and slight and wore thick glasses. "Pleased to meet you."

  Tom cleared his throat. This was damned awkward. "I'm a veterinarian, and last year I doctored a sick ewe up here."

  The monk nodded.

  "While I was here, I heard mention of a monk who'd been in the CIA."

  The monk nodded again.

  "Do you know who I'm talking about?"

  "Brother Ford."

  "Right. I was wondering if I could talk to him."

  The monk glanced at his watch, a big sports watch with buttons and dials, which looked out of place on the wrist of a monk, Tom wasn't sure why. Even monks needed to know the time.

  "Sext is just over. I'll go get him."

  The monk vanished up the trail. Five minutes later Tom was startled to see a gigantic figure marching down, his enormous feet in dusty sandals, a long wooden staff in his hand, his brown robes flapping behind him. A moment later the door was flung open and he came striding into the shop, his robes astir, and without a beat he strode up to Tom and enveloped his hand in a large, but surprisingly gentle, grasp.

  "Brother Wyman Ford," he graveled out in a distinctly unmonkish voice.

  "Tom Broadbent."

  Brother Ford was a strikingly ugly man, with a large head and a craggy face that looked like a cross between Abraham Lincoln and Herman Munster. The man didn't seem particularly pious, at least on the surface, and he certainly didn't look like a typical monk, with his powerful six-foot five-inch frame, beard, and unruly black hair that spilled over his ears.