“Iamthe obvious choice,” he says defensively. “We’ve had an unusual submission to the conference. A discovery of a novel proto-bird near the Hell Creek Formation. It looks like a missing link between dinosaurs with feathers and birds that could achieve true flight.”
Ripley’s heart drops into her boots.Fuck.That’s exactly what she set out to find, exactly where she would’ve sworn it was stupid to look.
If Beauty isn’t the first of her kind to be discovered—if she’s not declared the holotype—there’s no chance at securing the species name for Maury.
He’d knock a zero off the offer for that.
And if this other group has a complete skeleton, no private buyer will look at a wing with no body. Knock off another zero.
Calm down, Adams. Unfocus your eyes.
Beauty lived in a forest. The other fossil is from Hell Creek, a former inland seaway. There’s a reasonable chance they’re different animals.
Even if they’re the same, Ripley’s will be the only one available for private purchase. Maury will still want to buy a very rare fossil, especially if it’s stirring up a lot of attention in the paleontology world. Maybe not for eight figures. But seven. Possibly.
She straightens her spine. “I don’t see what this has to do with me.”
“Well.” He clears his throat, his Adam’s apple bobbing tightly. “The thing is,” he says, twining his long fingers together in a movement just shy of wringing, “I need you to help me prove it’s a fake.”
3
Ripley would think she were dreaming if everything weren’t so hyper-real: the flicker of bumblebees in the wildflowers, the breeze caressing her neck, the smell of earth and horse and something masculine and summer-grass-y that has to be Smithson.
“You want me to dowhat?”
“Help me expose a fraud,” he repeats. “Remember Archaeoraptor?”
Direct hit. “Vaguely,” she says, sarcasm restored to full operational capacity.
Archaeoraptor is a pain point between academic dinosaur geeks and private ones. True, it was a private fossil collector who glued raptor legs to a bird body to make the most famous fraud of the twenty-first century, but academics are hardly as pure as they pretend to be.
His eyes widen at whatever closed captions he sees on her unfortunately legible face. He starts talking faster. “They have a fully jointed skeleton. Very complete, minimal lateral compression. Absolutely stunning photos. Perfect soil spectrometry and MRI scans.”
“Not sure what you’d like me to do about your perfect conference-submission abstract, Professor.”
“That’s just it. It’stooperfect, and the lead author refuses to provide the original specimen for confirmatory testing. Too fragile, he says. It reminded me of…well, of the Himalayan scandal. You’re familiar with it?”
Ripley raises a sardonic brow. “I’ve heard of it.” An extremely prolific researcher had been accused of planting Moroccan fossils in the Himalayas after a curious colleague visited his Himalayan “dig sites” and found most of them had no fossils at all.
“Yes, of course,” he says. “He published close to five hundred papers. Many of them have never been retracted.”
“It’s not easy to prove something’s a fake even when it’s obviously a fake,” she agrees.
His gaze sharpens. “I knew you’d understand. We must stop frauds before they’re reported as facts. Once bad data enters the literature, it’s impossible to eradicate. It contaminates every taxonomy.”
“Data?” Ripley says, incredulous. “You thinkdatais the problem?”
“Yes?” Smithson says, sounding less sure than he did a minute ago.
She squeezes her eyes closed, nodding. Fuckingdata.Not people, not lives, not fairness. Not all the years and talent wasted because of scientific fraud.
Data.
She should’ve known better than to be flattered that he’d called her—her,Ripley Adams—an expert in anything. Even now, there’s a part of her that wants to help just because James Smithson asked her to.
Like she helped Will whenever he asked, until the one time she refused. And then he helped himself.
“You give a great speech, but you have the pull to uncover a fraud on your own. You don’t need me,” she says.
