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about their work.”
    “I like them,” George said. “But don’t forget that scene at Steffi’s tent last night.”
    I sighed. “That’s right. It seems like whenever I’m ready to decide someone can’t be a suspect, Iremember something that says they still are. We need to investigate Jimmy, anyway. He’s our number one suspect now.”
    “So what is Erlinda doing here?” George asked. “If she and Jimmy are involved in the fossil theft, isn’t she just calling attention to herself?”
    Erlinda walked past us without glancing our way. I called out to her. “Hello, Erlinda. How’s Jimmy?”
    She turned and glared at me. “You leave him alone! I don’t need any more snooty city girls giving him bad ideas.” She stormed off, following the road back toward her house.
    “Okaaay …,” George said. “I think we can forget about getting a dinner invitation.”
    Bess’s forehead wrinkled. “Is her behavior suspicious, or is she just unfriendly?”
    “She’s up to something now,” I said, “but she’s not a good candidate for last night’s theft. That would be fast work, if she learned that fossils are valuable only yesterday evening. Could Jimmy be the thief, and his mother doesn’t know it?”
    George grinned. “Sounds like we get a field trip to the ranch tonight.”
    Felix called us to dinner—an enormous pot of chili, plus a long loaf of garlic bread. We all ate like we hadn’t been fed in days. It’s amazing how hungry you get working outside—or solving mysteries.
    I called across the fire to Kyle. “So, what did Erlinda want anyway?”
    “She wants to find a million-dollar fossil on her land. But like most Western ranchers, she only owns a small fraction of the land her cattle use. She leases the rest from the state.” He gave a wry smile. “Of course, most ranchers think of all the land they use as ‘theirs,’ even if it isn’t legally. In any case, the land she owns is higher. It’s not the same geologic era as our spot, unfortunately for her.”
    “She must be annoyed at that,” I said. “Do you think she’d try to dig here?”
    Kyle’s smile turned to a scowl. “I don’t know. But so far, she doesn’t know enough to do any damage. She hardly knows what a fossil looks like, and I certainly wasn’t helping her.”
    “She couldn’t legally dig here, right?” I asked. “What exactly is the law?”
    “Basically, you can’t take vertebrate fossils from government land. That means dinosaurs, mammals, and anything else with a backbone. It’s considered stealing government property.”
    “But it’s legal to dig on private land, isn’t it?” George said. “Why don’t people just do that?”
    “First of all, in these Western states, the federal government owns a lot of the wild land, and obviously you can’t do much in cities or suburbs,” Kylesaid. “Second, ranchers who have a lot of fossils on their land know they’re worth money. They might charge thousands of dollars to let someone dig, and take a percentage of whatever is found.”
    Steffi broke in. “Once you take a bone out of the ground, no one can tell where it came from. So why would you pay a lot of money, if you can just sneak in and take the fossils for free?”
    “Um, maybe because you’re honest?” George said.
    Steffi smiled. “Sometimes people don’t even know they’re committing a crime. You wouldn’t believe the people who get caught doing illegal digs! Graduate students, school groups, scouting troops, youth groups. Hey, it’s fun and educational!” She shook her head. “I guess they just don’t think.”
    Kyle nodded. “Anyone might pick up a bone or two while they’re out on a hike. It’s still illegal, and it can cause trouble if we want to excavate that site. Maybe you would have had a whole skeleton, but now you have only part of it. It does damage.”
    He turned and glared in the direction of the dig. “But the professional thieves are the real problem. One study found that