True Crime Request

My mom's request was something true crime since that's her favorite thing ever.

GoFundMe Link: Markie's Canadian Dinosaur Adventure

Donate $10 and I'll write you a dinosaur short story with your requested genre, dinosaurs and whatever fun, silly, ridiculous thing you want to add.

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“Well, I’ll be damned.” Detective Garrett peered at the excavated crime scene with his brow furrowed. It wasn’t often that a man with almost twenty five years of experience in seeing the very weird ways people die gets a call he’s never seen before. Routine murders were a cakewalk, hell even most not routine ones had a pretty clear pattern to him, but this one was a genuine surprise.

While bulldozing the site for construction, a member of the crew noticed something strange sticking out from the dirt that he thought looked like a bone. He wouldn’t have thought much of it except the bone was massive, so he called in the local amature fossil hunting club to come check it out. The club was thrilled to get to work, but as they uncovered more of what seemed like a fantastic specimen of a tyrannosaur, there was something puzzling inside of its ribcage.

A human skeleton was sitting inside of its ribs, seeming to have been swallowed whole by the prehistoric beast.

“This is going to make the creationists throw a parade,” Garrett’s partner, Detective Andrews, chimed in from beside him. The younger man cocked his head to the side and squinted from the sun, putting his hands on his hips after motioning towards the scene. “What are your thoughts on this?”

“Well,” Garrett started carefully, squatting down to take a closer look. “There’s a reasonable explanation we’re just not seeing yet.”

“Reasonable,” Andrews snorted. “A trex swallowing a human millions of years before we’re supposed to have existed is...reasonable?”

“We’re sure they were buried at the same time?” Garrett asked, his eyes still drinking in the sight of the skeletons together.

“Yep. Crime scene said it seems like they were buried the same time and the fossil club says the rock layer matches with the time period the dinosaur is from. We’d need a better carbon date on the fossils to make sure but…” Andrews started with a shrug, totally at a loss.

“Dinosaur bones are too old for carbon dating. It’d work on the human though, because there’s no way in hell that guy was around during the Cretaceous,” Garrett pushed to his feet and shook out his legs to get the blood back in them.

“You’re so sure about that?” The younger detective argued gaining an annoyed glance from Garrett.

“Yeah, I’m sure. Did you not take sixth grade science, Andrews? We’re separated by 65 million years. Learn your epochs and read a damn geology book.” Garrett huffed and made his way to one of the fossil club members who had hung around to help their case. The woman was wearing their local fossil group’s shirt and an uncomfortable look of worry as she watched the skeletons in the pit.

“What can you tell me about the dinosaur miss…?” Garrett asked, extending his hand in greeting.

“Sarah. Nice to meet you,” she took his hand with a good shake and exhaled a little shakily. “I’ve just...never seen anything like that. I was so sure it was a hoax or...I-I dunno.”

“Tell me what you can,” Garrett prompted, letting the woman take a breath and compose herself. She moved some stray hairs that got blown loose from her long braid, tucking them behind her ear.

“It’s a juvenile trex, almost fully grown. Probably late Cretaceous. The odd thing about it though is...how complete it is,” she said with a confused head shake.

“What do you mean?” Garrett looked back at the skeleton in question. The massive body lay on its side, jaws open in a silent roar, legs extended out and a long tail behind its body. It was remarkably intact.

“You don’t see that in fossils. Normally you’ll get bits and pieces, half of a torso if you’re lucky and rarely the whole head. This was an extraordinary find before we found the human skeleton!” Her eyes were wide with amazement and excitement.

Garrett drummed his fingers on his hip as he thought, his eyes focused on the crime scene. “What about the bones themselves? Anything different about them?”

“No, not really, but to be fair we did come to a stop once we found the human skeleton, but even that has the same black coloration as the fossils,” she explained.

“That doesn’t mean anything. Human bones are subject to the same discoloration as any other bones buried in soil. They turn colors pretty fast, but I’m sure a fossil hunter knows that,” Garrett smiled some at her as he spoke so she knew he wasn’t poking fun or being sarcastic.

“Right. That’s why I’m thinking this has to be some type of really weird mistake, but I just can’t figure it out.” Sarah exhaled, crossing her arms and shaking her head. “The Natural History Museum’s paleontology expert is coming down to take a look. He might be able to tell us what’s going on.”

There was something the scene wasn’t telling Garrett and it was buzzing around his head like an annoying mosquito. A complete skeleton from a species that lived millions a years ago was apparently already almost impossible, and now the damn thing had a homo sapien lodged in its belly. The trex was on its side and the human seemed to be on its back with his arms up slightly like in defense. It did almost seem like the human was gulped down like an afternoon snack. Maybe he was too big and it caused the trex to choke or have killer indigestion. Garrett decided he needed a closer look.

The bones were buried about six feet down from ground level, so it wasn’t too difficult for him to jump down and take a peek. Getting back up was going to be a little more difficult, as the detective didn’t stay up on his fitness like his wife always told him to. He already had to put up with kale breakfast smoothies and low sodium food, so he was usually too annoyed to go for a run. Inside the pit the bones lay frozen in time and still half submerged in rock.

Garrett squatted down and peered at the bones. He could tell the human had been buried for at over a decade, judging by the lack of clothing around it and the deep, dark coloring of the bones. The body was male, maybe about mid twenties, good health, good teeth...not something he’d expect to find in a “cave man” or someone who didn’t have modern medicine. There was a shift in material towards the back of the human’s skull on the right side. Gently, Garrett brushed some dirt away to see a small metal plate, probably from a surgery, implanted against the bone.

This guy was definitely not a thing of the past. So what was this dinosaur? Garrett stood and glanced over the dinosaur, before moving up towards the head.

“What are you doing?” Andrews called from above, watching Garrett pacing around the bodies. “You have that Sherlock Holmes look in her eye.”

Garrett kneeled down beside the massive jaws of the tyrannosaur and felt its long, steak knife type teeth. The edges were rough and serrated like knives and were about the size of a banana, making Garrett shiver at the idea of something like this hunting down a human. Poor guy wouldn’t have stood a chance in hell. The teeth seemed secure in the head as he tried to wiggle one loose, finally giving up and glancing up at his partner.

“Toss down a hammer or something,” he called up, squinting from the bright sky. Andrews lifted his eyebrows in surprised but complied, tossing down a hammer and pick by Garrett’s feet. It took Garrett a couple tries to get the tooth to crack loose, using the hammer and pick to finally remove the big spike from the mouth.

“It’s fake,” Garrett announce, peering at where the tooth had separated from the skull.

“What do you mean fake?” Andrews quizzed, his surprise evident in his tone.

“It’s elementary, Watson,” Garrett quipped back with a smirk. A man with a beat up, straw cowboy hat leaned over the pit wearing a tie-dye shirt and jeans, leaning on a cane.

“What makes you think it’s fake?” the cowboy hat man asked, obviously wanting to jump down into the pit himself. Garrett walked to the edge where they were and tossed it up, the man catching it and squinting at the tooth..

“It looks like plaster or something,” Garrett said. “Are you the paleontologist from the museum?”

“Dr. Roberts, yes. And you’re right. This isn’t bone,” his voice sounded grave, his eyes moving to the human skeleton and his mouth set in a firm line.

“The human skull has a metal plate on it…” Garrett said, watching the man’s face blanch. “You know who this is, Dr. Roberts?”

“David Mope,” Dr. Roberts shook his head with a scowl, pulling his cowboy hat off his partially bald head. “That damn fool. The stupid thing killed him.”

Garrett hauled himself out of the pit with the help of his younger partner and dusted the dirt from his knees. “Care to explain?” he asked the paleontologist.

“About twenty five years ago, we found a trex skull...me and David. He was a fellow paleontologist who helped with the site. After we got the skull out, we wanted to open a park in the area to show the sight off and maybe get some more grants to dig, so the museum funded  a replica trex skeleton to be made.

“Well, me and David had a falling out, and right after the skeleton was made and brought to the site to be erected, it disappeared along with David. I always thought he somehow made like Hoodini and made the thing vanish. Never figured out how he did it. Until now.” Dr. Roberts let out a long sigh, his eyes going from pensive to mournful.

“Guess the damn thing fell on him when he was trying to move it. How did it get buried?” Garrett mused.

“There was a big storm that rolled in. The whole area was flooded with mudslides. Poor idiot,” Roberts shoved his hat back over his head. “I always told him the metal in his head made his brain short circuit when he got a bad idea.”

“Well, at least we know we didn’t have some type of ground breaking, reality shattering discovery the was going to prove the creationists right,” Andrews said with a laugh. Garrett rolled his eyes, shooting his partner a look.

“It was never going to be that. I’m going to assign you some homework, kid,” Garrett spat, turning back towards Dr. Roberts and shaking his hand in thanks. “Sorry for your loss, doctor.”

“Thank you. At least he died doing what he loved. Being an idiot and playing with bones.” He gave a weak smile and limped off back towards his truck.