An Eye for Gold Read online

  I had picked up a book before leaving Salt Lake City that gave the date of the arrival, in what is now northern Nevada, of the first people of European descent: 1826. The grizzled men of the competing Hudson’s Bay and Rocky Mountain Fur Companies had trudged over the mountains into this empty country looking for beaver. The book informed me that they had blithely set about emptying the region of its fur-bearing bounty, each killing every beaver he could find quickly before his rivals could find them. I wondered, with no small sense of shame, if the compulsion to strip a territory of its resources was a dominant gene found in most peoples of European descent or if, worse yet, it was simply part of being human.

  The Great Basin had been the last territory in North America explored by peoples of European descent except for, perhaps, some parts of the Arctic. Prior to the appearance of the fur trappers, miners, ranchers, and emigrants en route to California, wandering bands of Indians had lived there for at least twelve thousand years. I remembered classmates in college rhapsodizing on the subject of Indians living in harmony with nature, as if it had been a lifestyle choice. I reckoned that the Indians had made a damned fine accommodation of the limitations the environment imposed upon them. They had not enjoyed the luxury of imports like my truck and its gasoline and the box of canned food that rode in its bed. With no pleasure, I read Seven Arrows and found a description of just how long most Cheyennes stayed in harmony with nature or even each other once the white man dangled trade goods under their noses.

  The fact was that the environment of the Great Basin was so harsh that pre-White Indian culture had not developed past the humble scratchings of a hunter-gatherer society. And yet current theories suggested that the first Indians in the area hunted and gathered so effectively that they triggered the demise of the Ice-Age animals already stressed by the changing climate. The cheetah, the dire wolf, the camels, the horses, and the mammoths could not compete with the efficiency of the tool-wielding humans. And what, precisely, constituted harmony with nature?

  I lay in my bedroll at night pondering this conundrum. If living in harmony with what nature provided was a good thing, then why was it so hard to contemplate giving up the comforts and convenience of modern houses, microchips, blue jeans, and foreign-grown coffee? Could it be defined as not using any resources I couldn’t carry on my back? Or should I set an arbitrary limit of not using anything that had been grown or mined more than a day’s walk away? Monarch butterflies migrated thousands of miles each year. Were they in harmony with nature? And should humans seek harmony at the expense of using vaccines and vitamin pills, and shrink their average life expectancies back down to the age I currently enjoyed? What then? Would I have been happier living in a roaming tribe, pregnant at my first menses and dead of infection by my mid-thirties? At least then, I thought sadly, I would have known where I fit in. As I thought these thoughts, it occurred to me to wonder why I was having them. Were they inspired by my foolish interest in the Granville Resources case? No, it was something deeper. Somehow, the whole story reminded me of the impasse in which I found myself with Ray.

  Each day, I telephoned Ray, or tried to. I left terse, embarrassed messages on his answering machine, saying that I was all right, that the weather was fine, and that I loved him. I figured that might be about what MacCallum would say to Gretchen, if all he got was the machine. I wondered if he had yet called her. I wondered where he was. I wondered what he was doing. Was he, like me, just driving around somewhere in the Great Basin trying to sort himself out?

  I would have tried to call Ray again at night, but I slept miles off the highway, out of sight of through traffic and away even from my pickup truck, so that the only scavengers I’d have to worry about were those that might come on four legs. As I lay underneath the stars, he bloomed in my thoughts. I tried to put him out of my mind. I had learned about myself, over the long, lonely years that had been my life until then, that, when things just seemed too complicated for solutions, it was best to let go for a while and ruminate. Let go and give myself this kind of time, and this kind of space.

  In turn, the desert received me, stripping away my confusion layer by layer.

  I SUPPOSE I always knew, on some level, that I would eventually find my way all the way back to Lovelock. As I drew closer, I told myself that I wanted only to explore the open country with which Tom and Ian had teased me by driving through it so quickly. But I also rationalized that it would be a consideration to stop in and see the nice sheriff’s deputy—what had his name been? Weebe?—and ask him what he had discovered during his investigation into the death of Patricia Gilmore. He had been the odd man out, disagreeing with the sheriff, so it seemed the neighborly thing to do. And Tom needed my help, so what was the harm?

  By the time I had swung northward around the Sonoma Range, past Golconda and Winnemucca, and had come back southwestward, past the scorched remnants of what had been a high desert scrub where Patricia Gilmoie’s body had been found, and on towards Lovelock, I was intent on paying the man a visit. And so, on the fifth day after first meeting Deputy Weebe and hearing about the death of Patricia Gilmore, I pulled up once again in front of the Pershing County Sheriff’s Office.

  Weebe was there, greasing up his stubby fingers as he munched his way through a liverwurst sandwich and a bag of rippled potato chips. “Ah, Em Hansen, right? One of the FBI guys. I remember you. Have a chip?” He seemed quite elated to see me.

  “Don’t mind if I do. Just passing through. Thought I’d stop in and see how things are going. Learn anything more about Patricia Gilmore’s death?”

  Weebe’s hand closed spasmodically around the potato chip bag, reducing the contents to small flakes with a sickening crunch. He looked left and right, to make certain we were not being overheard. “Come with me,” he said, and led me into an inner office. There, he closed the door behind us before opening a drawer in his desk with the care one might take if it were rigged with motion-sensitive explosives. “I keep this clear in the back, with the wrong label on it,” he said, producing a manilla file. “Sheriff Obernick told me to keep my nose out of this. Hah. He filed his report already sayin’ it was accidental death, so you bet he don’t want me finding otherwise. But look what I got.”

  I realized about then that I had not explained to Weebe that I was not actually with the FBI, and that my visit was therefore totally unofficial, but rationalizing that it made no difference if I listened to what he had to say, I leaned forward attentively and smiled.

  Weebe selected a sheet of paper filled with pencilled notes written in a looping, schoolboy hand. It was a list of names, with thumbnail comments about where each person had been the night Pat Gilmore died, and what their motive might have been to kill her. “I got a list here of everyone as stands to gain from her death. Looky here. These all are miners, but that’s just for bein’ thorough, ‘cause they’re all local boys. I know ‘um. So they’re not really on the list. Now these—” he pointed at a second grouping “—these ones is more interesting to me. I got Virgil Davis, big guy runs the mine. She stops his action? He’s gonna hurt bad. Gotta close the mine in, maybe, and go somewheres else. Mebbe no work for an old geezer like that nowheres.”

  “Wait a minute. How could she close the mine? The endangered species she was studying is in a different place altogether.” And I remembered, she found that mouse to be just like everybody else’s mouse, and increasing its numbers and range, not diminishing.

  “Well, see, they need her to okay the places where they want to drill for another ore body. I been talkin’ to folks.” Weebe squinted at me, tapping the side of his head.

  “But how does shutting down new exploration close the existing mine?”

  “Runnin’ outta ore. Like I say, I know some miners. The grade’s holding, but the pice is dropped.”

  “Oh.” I took it to mean that they were finding the number of ounces of gold per ton of ore they had expected, but that the price per ounce of gold was lower than projections at the outset of mining. “
So Virgil Davis has no alibi, and may have had a motive.”

  “He lives up by die mine. Very suspicious. He’d of known when Gilmore left that night, could of chased her down and done something to her. And he’s the one as found her. Makes ya wonder, don’t it? Not a whole lot of witnesses out in that country. Well, he had John Steinhoff, the mill manager, with him and they vouch for each other, but then, maybe they was in cahoots.”

  My spine felt momentarily cold at the thought of death in the kind of country in which I’d just been camping. Alone. I pressed onward, shrugging off the chill. “Hmm. I see you’ve got MacCallum, the exploration geologist.”

  “Right. still missing. Kinda makes you wonder.”

  “Oh, yeah. And who’s this?”

  “Kyle Christie. Worked with MacCallum. He claims he don’t know where his partner is. Verrry suspicious. And he looks purty nervous. If he ain’t done nothing he shouldn’t, I’ll eat my hat.”

  Ignoring the fact that his double negative cancelled out his assertion, I said, “Okay. And these guys. Joe Enciso. Nelson Jobes. Laurel Dietz.”

  “Other geologists at the mine. I checked ‘em all out. Enciso and Jobes got alibis, they were on shift underground when it happened. Dietz is this little blonde girl. She couldn’t of done it.”

  I glanced at him. “You’re sure?” I wanted to watch his face, and see whether his supposition was based solely on her gender. “She was underground, too?”

  He shrugged his rounded shoulders. “No, I don’t know. But she said she’d gone home a long time before Gilmore left the site. She has no eyewitnesses to prove she did, but I talked to her a good little bit, and she don’t got it in her. Nice kid.” He nodded and scrunched up his face knowingly.

  “Hmm. And who’s this?” I asked, seeing another name I recognized.

  “Rodriguez. Little beaner as squealed on her to her boss. He didn’t like her, see? Hated her, near as I can figger. It bears watching.”

  “But you don’t know where he was the night of the crime,” I said, noticing that the space beneath his name was blank. I noticed also that I was rather shamelessly encouraging Weebe to continue to presume that Patricia’s death was, in fact, a case of murder, and not a bad luck road accident as his boss had surmised.

  “Nope. Didn’t get to him before he disappeared.”

  “Rodriguez is gone, too?”

  “Yep. Suspicious, huh?”

  “Yeah, like you say, makes you wonder. So did anyone do an autopsy?”

  “Sure, the coroner took a squint at her. ‘Accidental death,’ just like Obernick. Old drinking buddies, them two.”

  “And who found her?”

  Weebe tapped his finger on the page. “Virgil Davis and John Steinhoff.” He tapped the page again. “Motive. And no alibi. What’s to say they didn’t wait out there and get her themselves? Then all’s they’s got to do is drive on into town and go boo-hoo, we found us a dead lady.”

  “Can you show me on this map where the wreck was found?” I pushed my road atlas his way.

  Weebe ran his finger up and down the map, but couldn’t put a fix on the spot “Well, it’s somewheres where the road goes into a curve, and it’s south of the crossroads here.”

  Very gingerly, I turned to a pithier topic. “So how you reckon she was got?”

  Weebe scrunched his face again. “Shot out her tire.”

  “You’re kidding me! You got a tire with a bullet hole in it?” The scene instantly appeared in my mind in lurid detail: Lone woman in pickup truck barreling along a deserted road, nearly floating over the washboarding as she hurries home. A bullet hits her front tire, exploding it on impact. The truck swerves, bucks, flips end for end, crushing the cab and killing the occupant. I thought briefly about phoning Gretchen MacCallum and asking if her husband was a particularly good shot, but decided against it.

  “No. But one front tire was differ’nt from the others, and there weren’t no spare. The whole hulk was burned from that range fire, see, but I took a good, long look at it after they brought it in on the flatbed.”

  My mind raced. If Weebe was right, someone had hidden in the sagebrush, waiting for her to pass, and that person had hurried to the overturned truck, made certain his victim was dead, and then coolly changed the tire and disposed of the other. To pull this off, he—or she; it wouldn’t require great strength, only accuracy—would have left tracks in the swelling clays of the desert floor, or might alternatively have left telltale signs of having erased them. “You got tracks?” I asked, excitement mounting.

  “No,” he said, his face crumpling into a pout.

  “So you haven’t actually seen the site of the crash.”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Why not?”

  Weebe sucked in a long breath and adjusted his Sam Browne belt. “Well, first there was that fire. Then when that burned itself out, I did go out there, see, but I wasn’t ezzackly sure where the wreck had been. And I’ve had to be careful how I ask people . . .” His voice trailed off, and he ran a finger across the desk top, unconsciously hanging his head like a little boy who’s been caught rustling cookies.

  “Because Sheriff Obernick has other ideas,” I said diplomatically.

  Weebe’s lower lip had pushed up into a full-blown pout. “Ezzackly.”

  I DROVE OVER to the yard where Weebe told me I would find Pat Gilmore’s truck, or what was left of it. It was a full-sized, high-sprung, four-wheel-drive Ford pickup with a big engine. She must have been going pretty damned fast, because the roof had been slammed down halfway to the dashboard, like a safe had been dropped on it. She would have had to have been a dwarf to survive that kind of compaction. I winced with empathy.

  The truck had been roasted stem to stern in the range fire. The inside of the cab had been gutted by the flames; just a melted residue of plastic on metal springs, not much evidence that I could glean there. The glove compartment door was open, although that didn’t indicate much. Mine flopped open every time I hit a bump.

  I walked around to the tire which Weebe had thought suspicious. The fire had cooked it, too, but sure enough, the gummy mess around the rim brandished the remnants of a different belting pattern than did the other three, and there was no spare on the bed or bolted up underneath it. I straightened up and thought this through. Pat Gilmore had been a wildlife biologist, a professional who worked in remote areas, probably by herself. To run a trap line survey around old mining claims, she would have had to drive up some pretty sketchy old two-rut roads. I couldn’t imagine her being stupid enough to try that without a spare tire.

  I walked all the way around the truck, still pondering Weebe’s hypothesis. If I had just shot out someone’s tire and caused them to crash, I decided, I would check the tire and rim to make certain I’d left no ballistic evidence. If I found, for instance, an impact mark from the bullet, I would remove that rim and dispose of it far, far away.

  Then another, even more sickening thought occurred to me: And if I was the least bit concerned about leaving evidence, I’d set fire to the whole desert to conceal it.

  I staggered over to my truck, half ready to vomit I climbed in and shut the door, and even with the heat of the day, considered closing the windows. I felt unsafe, exposed, suddenly unable to forget and filter out the hideous impact of the callous disregard so many members of my race held for natural resources such as deserts, and the thousand million animals and plants who lived there. Somehow, I could better cope with the thought of a human killing one other human than a human setting fire to a whole ecosystem just to cover the already vicious and dishonest act of murder.

  I turned the key in the ignition and drove away, turning left and right at random, until I found myself driving down a residential side street near the edge of town. The houses seemed spare and restful, blandly innocent, but still I shook with fear and sadness, and wondered if the killer lived behind one of these doors.

  But I had no real evidence that Pat Gilmore had been killed, and had not just messed up and
crashed all on her own. I chastised myself for my overactive sense of drama, hoping I could stuff the genie back into the bottle and just drive away.

  I saw a house that looked familiar, and I realized that I was approaching the place where I’d met the woman with the ruined face. I stopped the truck about a half block away from Shirley Cook’s house and let it idle in the middle of the lane, trying to figure out what to do next.

  Then a strange thing happened. I was just noticing that an old white Toyota sedan was parked in front of Shirley’s house, and deciding that she must have a visitor, when that visitor came out of her front door, came down the walkway to the front gate, and stood looking at me, as if she had been waiting for me to arrive. She was broadly built and had long dark hair parted in the middle and die wide, flat facial planes of a Native American.

  Tom Latimer’s words rang in my ear. What if she’s waiting for you at the border? The hair stood up on die back of my neck.

  I jammed die truck into reverse, backed it into a driveway, and pulled quickly away in the opposite direction.

  25

  I DECIDED THAT I MUST BE LOSING MY MIND. I HAD come out here to think and relax, and here I was seeing freakish portents in the actions of total strangers. It was time to leave the world of humans altogether, at least for a while, and head out into the heart of the arid lands, those busily inhabited realms in which all is revealed and nothing is covered. Humans are more secretive and deceptive in their thinking and in their behavior than the creatures of the desert. Certainly, the horned toad tries to look like a stack of sharp pebbles so he can hide from his enemies and lay in ambush for his prey, and tiny mice that feed on sparse grasses hide from the heat and predators during the bright hours of day, but the trails of their passage lie open for the eye to see, and there is no crowding canopy of leaves to obscure the far horizon.